The Civil Rights Movement Viewpoints PDF

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The Civil Rights
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Movement
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Opposing Viewpoints in World History series:
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W E
OPPOSING VIEWPOINTS®
S
IN WORLD HISTORY
The Civil Rights

Movement
Jill Karson, Book Editor
Bruce Glassman, Vice President

Bonnie Szumski, Publisher
Helen Cothran, Managing Editor
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Library of Congress, 16, 37, 80, 136, 144
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

The civil rights movement / Jill Karson, book editor.
p. cm. — (Opposing viewpoints in world history)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-7377-2578-8 (pbk. : alk. paper) — ISBN 0-7377-2577-X (lib. : alk. paper)
1. African Americans—Civil rights—History—Twentieth century. 2. Civil rights
movements—United States—History—Twentieth century. 3. United States—Race
relations. 4. African Americans—Civil rights—History—Twentieth century—
Sources. 5. Civil rights movements—United States—History—Twentieth
century—Sources. 6. United States—Race relations—Sources. I. Karson, Jill.
II. Opposing viewpoints in world history series.
E185.61.C6145 2005
323.1196'073—dc22 2004049715
Printed in the United States of America

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Contents
Foreword 9
Introduction 11
Chapter 1: How Did the Fight for Rights Begin?
Chapter Preface 22
1. Blacks Should Not Agitate for Civil Rights
by Booker T. Washington 24
To uplift their position in society, blacks should forego
political agitation in favor of industrial education, self-
improvement, and economic self-reliance.
2. Blacks Should Agitate for Civil Rights

by W.E.B. Du Bois 30
Blacks must take an active role in securing their constitu-
tional rights. When these rights are denied, aggressive po-
litical and legal action, including agitation, is necessary.
3. Booker T. Washington’s Leadership Was Flawed

by Martin Kilson 35
As a race leader, Washington concentrated too heavily on
social system advancement and neglected important hu-
man rights issues, which stymied black progress.
4. Booker T. Washington’s Leadership Was Effective

by Adam Fairclough 42
Washington has been judged too harshly by historians. He
did not endorse second-class citizenry for blacks as his
critics charge; rather, his advocacy of industrial training
and accommodation was a practical approach to the de-
mands of the southern agricultural industry.
5. Civil Rights Can Be Secured Through Mass Action

by A. Philip Randolph 56
Mass action is a potent weapon in the fight for civil rights.
Indeed, by banding together, blacks can make their voices
heard and compel society to address their grievances.
6. Civil Rights Can Be Secured Through Legal Action

by Thurgood Marshall 61
To achieve equality, blacks must dismantle the legal barri-
ers to civil rights. To this end, legal strategies must focus
on enforcing existing civil rights statutes and creating new
legislation.
Chapter 2: Segregation or Integration?

Chapter Preface 72
1. Segregation Is Morally Wrong by Thurgood Marshall 74
America’s discriminatory racial practices are harmful, un-
constitutional, and in violation of the Judeo-Christian
ethic upon which the nation was built.
2. Segregation Is Necessary by James Jackson Kilpatrick 86

The movement for integration is based on the mistaken
assumption that the races are equal. In truth, blacks are
inherently inferior to whites, which justifies segregation in
the schools and elsewhere.
3. School Segregation Is Unconstitutional by Earl Warren 93

Because it deprives the minority group of equal educa-
tional opportunities, the segregation of children in public
schools solely on the basis of race is unconstitutional.
4. The Government Should Not Interfere in School

Segregation by the Southern Manifesto 99
The Supreme Court went beyond its authority when it
ruled in Brown v. Board of Education to desegregate the
public schools.
5. Brown v. Board of Education Boosted Civil Rights

by Julius L. Chambers 105
The Court’s landmark decision in Brown v. Board of Edu-
cation enhanced educational opportunities for black stu-
dents and thereby contributed to the social and economic
progress of blacks in general.
6. Brown v. Board of Education Failed to Promote Civil

Rights by Louis Anthes 113
The Brown decision failed to immediately integrate the
schools and undermined the long-term effort to remedy

discrimination in American society.
Chapter 3: What Were the Strategies of the Civil Rights

Movement?
Chapter Preface 120
1. Federal Legislation Will Strengthen Civil Rights
by John F. Kennedy 121
Congress must enact legislation to end racial injustice so
that blacks and other minorities can fully participate in
American society.
2. Federal Civil Rights Legislation Is Inadequate

by James Farmer 128
In the fight for civil rights, legislative and other efforts by
federal, state, and local governments are largely inade-
quate. Rather, blacks must implement a program of inde-
pendent political action.
3. Blacks Must Employ Nonviolent Resistance

by Martin Luther King Jr. 133
Blacks must remain committed to the philosophy of non-
violence, which renders the ethic of love central to the
fight for civil rights.
4. Nonviolent Resistance Is Not Enough by Malcolm X 140

To expel the yoke of a crippling white power structure,
blacks must employ any means necessary in the fight for
racial justice.
5. Blacks Should Strive for Black Power

by Stokely Carmichael 147
Black power addresses a variety of racial grievances and
provides a philosophy by which blacks might reclaim their
cultural identity and mobilize their economic and political
power.
6. Black Power Is Ineffective by Kenneth Clark 159

Black power is not a bulwark against racial injustice.
While it reflects the growing frustration of disenfranchised
blacks, it fails to offer pragmatic solutions to racial
problems.
7. King’s Protest Campaigns Had a Limited Impact

on Civil Rights by Denton L. Watson 169
King’s protest campaigns indeed publicized black de-
mands. Yet the legal machinery of the NAACP had a more
profound impact on the cause of civil rights.
8. King’s Protest Campaigns Bolstered Civil Rights

by Adam Mack 174
Although legal strategies were important to the civil rights
movement, the mass action campaigns led by King and
others played a more pivotal role in securing black rights.
Chapter 4: Who Played the Most Important Role in the

Civil Rights Movement?
Chapter Preface 181
1. National Leaders Played the Most Important Role
in the Civil Rights Movement by Steven F. Lawson 183
The federal government, in tandem with national civil
rights organizations, played an indispensable role in shap-
ing the civil rights revolution—largely through the passage
of decisive civil rights legislation.
2. Grassroots Organizers Played the Most Important

Role in the Civil Rights Movement by David J. Garrow 195
The real catalysts of the civil rights movement were the ev-
eryday people who initiated protests in small towns and
cities across the South and acted without the backing of
the well-known national organizations.
For Further Discussion 201

Chronology 203
For Further Research 213
Index 216
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Foreword
O n December 2, 1859, several hundred soldiers gathered at the

outskirts of Charles Town, Virginia, to carry out, and pro-
vide security for, the execution of a shabbily dressed old man with
a beard that hung to his chest. The execution of John Brown
quickly became and has remained one of those pivotal historical
events that are immersed in controversy. Some of Brown’s con-
temporaries claimed that he was a religious fanatic who deserved
to be executed for murder. Others claimed Brown was a heroic
and selfless martyr whose execution was a tragedy. Historians have
continued to debate which picture of Brown is closest to the truth.
The wildly diverging opinions on Brown arise from fundamen-
tal disputes involving slavery and race. In 1859 the United States
was becoming increasingly polarized over the issue of slavery.
Brown believed in both the necessity of violence to end slavery and
in the full political and social equality of the races. This made him
part of the radical fringe even in the North. Brown’s conviction
and execution stemmed from his role in leading twenty-one white
and black followers to attack and occupy a federal weapons arse-
nal in Harpers Ferry, Virginia. Brown had hoped to ignite a large
slave uprising. However, the raid begun on October 16, 1859, failed
to draw support from local slaves; after less than thirty-six hours,
Brown’s forces were overrun by federal and local troops. Brown
was wounded and captured, and ten of his followers were killed.
Brown’s raid—and its intent to arm slaves and foment insur-
rection—was shocking to the South and much of the North. An
editorial in the Patriot, an Albany, Georgia, newspaper, stated that
Brown was a “notorious old thief and murderer” who deserved to
be hanged. Many southerners expressed fears that Brown’s actions
were part of a broader northern conspiracy against the South—
fears that seemed to be confirmed by captured letters document-
ing Brown’s ties with some prominent northern abolitionists,
some of whom had provided him with financial support. Such
alarms also found confirmation in the pronouncements of some
speakers such as writer Henry David Thoreau, who asserted that
9
10 THE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT
Brown had “a perfect right to interfere by force with the slave-

holder, in order to rescue the slave.” But not all in the North de-
fended Brown’s actions. Abraham Lincoln and William Seward,
leading politicians of the nascent Republican Party, both de-
nounced Brown’s raid. Abolitionists, including William Lloyd
Garrison, called Brown’s adventure “misguided, wild, and appar-
ently insane.” They were afraid Brown had done serious damage
to the abolitionist cause.
Today, though all agree that Brown’s ideas on racial equality are
no longer radical, historical opinion remains divided on just what
Brown thought he could accomplish with his raid, or even
whether he was fully sane. Historian Russell Banks argues that
even today opinions of Brown tend to split along racial lines.
African Americans tend to view him as a hero, Banks argues, while
whites are more likely to judge him mad. “And it’s for the same
reason—because he was a white man who was willing to sacrifice
his life to liberate Black Americans. The very thing that makes him
seem mad to white Americans is what makes him seem heroic to
Black Americans.”
The controversy over John Brown’s life and death remind read-
ers that history is replete with debate and controversy. Not only
have major historical developments frequently been marked by
fierce debates as they happened, but historians examining the
same events in retrospect have often come to opposite conclusions
about their causes, effects, and significance. By featuring both con-
temporaneous and retrospective disputes over historical events in
a pro/con format, the Opposing Viewpoints in World History se-
ries can help readers gain a deeper understanding of important
historical issues, see how historical judgments unfold, and develop
critical thinking skills. Each article is preceded by a concise sum-
mary of its main ideas and information about the author. An in-
depth book introduction and prefaces to each chapter provide
background and context. An annotated table of contents and in-
dex help readers quickly locate material of interest. Each book also
features an extensive bibliography for further research, questions
designed to spark discussion and promote close reading and crit-
ical thinking, and a chronology of events.
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Introduction
T he civil rights movement that spanned the years following the

Brown v. Board of Education decision of 1954 through the pas-
sage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 marked a watershed period
that accomplished far more than the elimination of racial barri-
ers; it led to the overwhelming transformation of American social,
cultural, and political life. Changes to prevailing notions about the
citizenship rights of blacks, for example, coupled with a redefini-
tion of the role of the government and courts in protecting these
rights, continue to bolster the human rights of all Americans, re-
gardless of their skin color.
The words civil rights often conjure images of Martin Luther
King Jr. delivering his soul-stirring “I Have a Dream” speech be-
fore the nation’s capital. On a darker note, many recall television
footage of peaceful marchers beset by fire hoses and snarling po-
lice dogs, or the resolute faces of black college students as they
waged their sit-in campaigns at southern lunch counters. Cer-
tainly one of the most trenchant set of images—and perhaps rep-
resenting the nadir of the movement—are the photographs of
four young black schoolgirls who were killed when a bomb ripped
through the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church where they were at-
tending Sunday school. These and other images are a testament
to the intense burst of black activism—and the resulting white
backlash—that characterized the civil rights movement of the
mid–twentieth century.
Yet African Americans have always struggled for their rights.
Many consider the civil rights movement to have begun not in the
1950s but when Africans were first brought in chains, centuries
earlier, to American shores. In particular, those blacks who fought
their enslavement and demanded fundamental citizenship rights
laid the foundation for the modern civil rights movement.
The Legacy of Slavery

The first slaves were brought to America in 1619. Not until the
Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery following the Civil War
11
did blacks gain their freedom. Yet the newly freed blacks were
largely illiterate and bereft of money or property, and racism and
inequality were rampant, especially in the South, where slavery
had predominated for so long. To aid black assimilation into
white society, federal and state governments implemented many
democratic reforms between the years 1865 and 1875, the Recon-
struction era. The Fourteenth Amendment, for example, guaran-
teed blacks federally protected equal rights, and the Fifteenth
Amendment granted black men the right to vote.
Despite these and other measures to safeguard the former slaves’
newfound rights, the gains of the once-promising Reconstruction
era were short-lived. In a climate of extreme southern white hege-
mony, many employed a variety of means to keep blacks from en-
joying any of the benefits of citizenship. Some, for example,
sought to keep blacks completely disenfranchised through ha-
rassment or intimidation. A number of racist groups, such as the
vigilante Ku Klux Klan (KKK), used even more harrowing meth-
ods—lynching and other forms of violence, for example—to bru-
talize and terrify blacks seeking to exercise their rights or advance
their standing.
As the constitutional guarantees of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth,
and Fifteenth amendments continued to erode, the Supreme
Court struck perhaps the most crippling blow to the black strug-
gle for equality: In 1896 the Court ruled in Plessy v. Ferguson that
blacks and whites could be legally separated as long as the facili-
ties for each were “equal.” Facilities for blacks and whites, how-
ever, were rarely equal. More importantly, the Supreme Court’s
“separate but equal” doctrine, by legally backing segregation, gave
white society a powerful tool to keep blacks from enjoying even
the most rudimentary rights of citizenship. With the Supreme
Court now reinforcing the South’s segregation practices, the en-
vironment of white racism gave birth to Jim Crow—southern cus-
toms and laws that kept parks, drinking fountains, streetcars,
restaurants, theaters, and other public places rigidly segregated.
In response to Jim Crow, which by 1900 extended into all
spheres of public life, several leaders in the black community
stepped up to debate political strategies to fight injustice and racial
inequality. One of the dominant figures of this early movement for
INTRODUCTION 13
civil rights was the fiery intellectual W.E.B. Du Bois, who exhorted
blacks to fight for the rights they deserved. Du Bois’s crusade led,
in part, to the formation of the National Association for the Ad-
vancement of Colored People (NAACP), a civil rights organization
that brought together lawyers, educators, and activists to collec-
tively fight for black civil rights. Through lobbying, agitation, and
legal action, the NAACP continued a steady campaign to end seg-
regation in housing, education, and other areas of public life.
With the outbreak of World War I, well over a quarter of a mil-
lion black troops joined the military, but were relegated to segre-
gated units. At the same time, many blacks traveled north to take
advantage of the burgeoning defense industries. This massive mi-
gration, however, aggravated unemployment and other problems
that already plagued the northern urban centers. Racial problems
continued unabated. When the United States entered World War
II, African Americans were, as before, subjected to rampant dis-
crimination in the defense industries and in military units—de-
spite their willingness to risk their lives in combat. These wartime
experiences, coupled with the redistribution of the black popu-
lace, resulted in a surge of black protest that brought Jim Crow
under national scrutiny.
The Birth of a Movement

During the 1950s, two incidents brought the issue of civil rights
squarely into the public spotlight. On May 17, 1954, the NAACP,
which had been steadily chipping away at the legal foundations of
segregation, won an unprecedented legal victory: The Supreme
Court unanimously ruled in Brown v. Board of Education that seg-
regation in public schools was unconstitutional. Chief Justice Earl
Warren presented the Court’s decision, in which he describes why
“separate but equal” in education represents a violation of black
Americans’ rights:
Segregation of white and colored children in public schools

has a detrimental effect upon the colored children. The im-
pact is greater when it has the sanction of the law; for the pol-
icy of separating the races is usually interpreted as denoting
the inferiority of the Negro group. A sense of inferiority af-
fects the motivation of a child to learn. Segregation, with the

sanction of law, therefore, has a tendency to inhibit the edu-
cational and mental development of Negro children and de-
prive them of some of the benefits they would receive in a
racially integrated school system.
In nullifying the “separate but equal” doctrine set forth in Plessy

v. Ferguson, the high court had struck an unequivocal blow to seg-
regation. Yet southern racist practices were deeply entrenched,
and many whites remained adamantly opposed to change. The
implementation of Brown, then, remained painstakingly slow, if
not nonexistent. Many school officials refused to comply with the
ruling, and the threat of harassment—for the ruling had un-
leashed fierce resistance—prevented many black students from
enrolling in all-white schools. At the same time, schools for black
students remained overcrowded, dilapidated, and, in general,
grossly inferior to those that their white counterparts enjoyed.
The second incident that captured the public eye unfolded in
Montgomery, Alabama, where a seamstress named Rosa Parks cre-
ated the spark that would provide the momentum for the entire
civil rights movement. On December 1, 1955, the NAACP mem-
ber boarded a public bus and took a seat in the “Negro” section in
the back of the bus. Later, Parks refused to relinquish her seat to a
white passenger, defying the law by which blacks were required to
give up their seats to white passengers when the front section, re-
served for whites, was filled. Parks was immediately arrested.
In protest, the black community launched a one-day local boy-
cott of Montgomery’s public bus system. As support for Parks bur-
geoned, the NAACP and other black leaders took advantage of the
opportunity to draw attention to their cause. They enlisted the help
of a relatively unknown preacher, Martin Luther King Jr., to orga-
nize and lead a massive resistance movement that would challenge
Montgomery’s racist laws. Four days after Parks’s arrest, the city-
wide Montgomery bus boycott began. It lasted for more than a
year. Despite taunting and other forms of harassment from the
white community, the boycotters persevered until the federal courts
intervened and desegregated the buses on December 21, 1956.
The Montgomery bus boycott was important not only because
INTRODUCTION 15
it struck down a particularly overt Jim Crow law that affected

many southern blacks but because it demonstrated that the black
community, through unity and determination, could make their
voices heard and effect change. Picketing, boycotting, and other
forms of resistance spread rapidly to communities throughout the
South. Meanwhile, King emerged as the movement’s preeminent
leader. His adherence to the nonviolent tactics used by the Indian
nationalist Mohandas Gandhi would largely characterize the en-
tire civil rights movement and inspire large-scale participation by
whites as well as blacks.
The Pace Quickens

From 1955 to 1960, the efforts of blacks to bring attention to their
cause met with some success. In 1957 Congress passed the Civil
Rights Act—the first since Reconstruction—to establish a civil
rights division in the Justice Department that would enforce voting
and other rights. Meanwhile, the NAACP continued to challenge
the underpinnings of segregation, and a number of new organiza-
tions were formed to take up the banner of civil rights. Among
these, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), a
Christian-based organization founded in 1957 and led by King, be-
came a major force in organizing the civil rights movement.
Other organizations, too, made headway in publicizing the
many civil rights abuses that continued to plague southern blacks.
The newly formed Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee
(SNCC) grabbed the media spotlight—and triggered a flood of
protests—when it backed four students who launched a sit-in
campaign to desegregate southern lunch counters. Not only was
the nonviolent sit-in technique used to desegregate other public
places, but it gave large numbers of black youths a way to partic-
ipate in the movement. As legions of young African Americans
came forward to take part in boycotts, demonstrations, and ral-
lies, expectations swelled. At the same time, the escalating black
protest spurred extensive coverage by the national media, bring-
ing black demands before the public eye as never before.
In 1961 the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) harnessed this
rising tide of student activism and sent a band of young volun-
teers on what became known as freedom rides. These interracial
bus trips were designed to test the implementation of laws that

prohibited segregation on buses, interstate terminals, and other
facilities along the way. Despite their adherence to nonviolence,
freedom riders were met with open hostility. Many were jailed.
Far more harrowing, however, was the real threat of violence. One
group encountered a mob in Alabama that set the riders’ bus on
fire, and proceeded to beat them as they fled the burning vehicle.
The freedom riders continued their campaign, however, until
President John F. Kennedy intervened and directed the enforce-
ment of regulations barring segregation in interstate travel.
The protest movement continued to accelerate as different lead-
ers and groups—buoyed by recent gains—tested new tactics and
strategies. Many established community-based projects that
sought to combat the barriers that kept blacks from voting. Oth-
NAACP office workers in Detroit organize a membership drive in the 1940s.

Members fight to end segregation in housing, education, and public life.
INTRODUCTION 17
ers targeted the white terrorism that continued to intimidate

blacks into submission. In this vein, King and other leaders
launched a massive campaign that brought together thousands of
blacks in Birmingham, Alabama, one of the most segregated and
violently racist cities at the time. Early in the campaign, King was
arrested and jailed. From his cell, he penned his famous “Letter
from Birmingham Jail,” which earned him the support of many
sympathetic whites.
Meanwhile, as blacks continued the desegregation campaign in
Birmingham, an event occurred that irrevocably commanded the
attention of America and its leaders: In an effort to stop a demon-
stration, the notoriously racist police chief Eugene “Bull” Connor
turned vicious attack dogs and fire hoses on the peaceful demon-
strators. The force of the water slammed women and children to
the ground and sent others hurling through the air. Television
coverage and other media reports of these brutal assaults shocked
the nation—and viewers around the world. After a month of this
highly publicized violence, city officials repealed Birmingham’s
segregation laws.
In Birmingham’s aftermath, mass demonstrations continued to
spread, as did fierce resistance within the white community. On
June 12, 1963, for example, Alabama governor George Wallace
brazenly attempted to block the entrance of two black students to
the University of Alabama. Although Wallace was unsuccessful,
tempers in the black community flared. That night, President
Kennedy addressed the nation in a televised speech. Pledging to
align his presidency with the cause of civil rights, Kennedy called
for legislation that would ban segregation and broaden the federal
protection of civil rights for all Americans.
The March on Washington

In response to these events, King and other leaders, including the
veteran civil rights activist A. Philip Randolph, planned a mass
gathering on the nation’s capital in the summer of 1963. The lead-
ers hoped to spur the passage of civil rights legislation and pro-
mote economic opportunity within the black community. On Au-
gust 28, the March on Washington brought an estimated quarter
of a million people, black and white, before the Lincoln Memo-
rial, where King delivered his now famous “I Have a Dream”

speech. In rousing words, King described a world of racial har-
mony and equality:
I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in
a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their
skin but by the content of their character. I have a dream to-
day. I have a dream that one day the state of Alabama . . . will
be transformed into a situation where little black boys and
black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and
white girls and walk together as sisters and brothers. I have a
dream today.
The March on Washington generated high hopes that blacks
would soon fully realize the dream of America. Black optimism
was soon tempered, however. In addition to a spate of highly pub-
licized incidents of racial violence, the much vaunted civil rights
legislation seemed to languish in Congress. Following President
Kennedy’s assassination in November 1963, though, President
Lyndon B. Johnson resolved to translate Kennedy’s commitment
to civil rights into action. After much political maneuvering, John-
son won congressional approval and signed the Civil Rights Act
of 1964 into law. The legislation outlawed segregation in public
facilities and discrimination in employment and education.
Meanwhile, SNCC had inaugurated a wide-scale campaign to
bolster voting rights. To this end, the group launched a massive
voter registration drive throughout the South, concentrating on
Mississippi, where less than 5 percent of the state’s eligible blacks
were registered to vote. Freedom Summer, as it became known,
was marked by episodes of extreme white terrorism. One of the
most heinous examples involved three young civil rights workers.
The trio was working to register voters when they were arrested
and later murdered by the Ku Klux Klan.
By 1965 the voting campaign had shifted to Selma, Alabama,
where, under the leadership of King, thousands of demonstrators
began a fifty-mile trek to Montgomery. This time, as the peaceful
demonstrators approached the Edmund Pettis Bridge, state troop-
ers used police whips and clubs to halt their progress. The scene
blasted into American living rooms via the nightly news. After
INTRODUCTION 19
“Bloody Sunday,” thousands of people reconvened and completed

the march, this time under the protection of the Alabama Na-
tional Guard. On August 6, 1965, shortly after the highly publi-
cized events in Selma, President Johnson signed into law the Vot-
ing Rights Act, which, for the first time since Reconstruction,
effectively opened up the polls to southern black Americans.
The Rise of Black Nationalism

By the mid-1960s, many black activists started to lose faith in the
civil rights reforms that thus far had targeted only the most blatant
forms of discrimination. The demise of court-mandated segrega-
tion, for example, did not bestow immediate equality upon blacks
or reform a political system that left blacks economically and po-
litically crippled. Thus, while King’s nonviolent direct-action ap-
proach had dominated the 1950s and early 1960s, many blacks,
particularly in the North, adopted a more revolutionary stance.
As a wave of nationalist sentiment grew within the movement,
organizations such as SNCC and CORE took up more militant
agendas. The once moderate SNCC, for example, began advocat-
ing a program of “black power”—a term that endorsed racial
pride and, in its most extreme form, complete separation from
white society.
The greatest spokesman for black nationalism was Malcolm X.
With his working-class roots and charismatic style of speaking,
Malcolm appealed to a broad band of young urban blacks. Mal-
colm rejected King’s advocacy of nonviolence and instead urged
his followers to secure their rights “by any means necessary.” The
NAACP and SCLC, still striving to integrate into mainstream so-
ciety, vehemently criticized Malcolm’s revolutionary views, and
especially his advocacy of complete racial separation. After Mal-
colm’s assassination in February 1965, another extremely
provocative black nationalist group emerged: the Black Panthers,
a group that boldly adopted the slain leader’s mantra “by any
means necessary.”
Black discontent continued to swell during the latter half of the
decade. Race riots exploded across America, as blacks trapped in
urban slums lashed out against the poverty and racism still ram-
pant in their communities. Not only did the riots devastate ghetto
areas that were home to millions of blacks, including those in the

Watts section of Los Angeles, but the racial violence amplified the
deepening chasm between those who continued to believe that
civil rights could be achieved through peaceful means and the
more militant vanguard of the movement. King’s assassination in
April 1968 dealt perhaps the final crippling blow to the already
fractured civil rights movement. Although groups with opposing
agendas continued to operate, what had once been a unified quest
for civil rights had splintered and lost momentum.
The Legacy of the Civil Rights Movement

The American civil rights movement nevertheless left a perma-
nent mark on American society. The most overt forms of racial
discrimination came to an end, and racial violence declined im-
measurably. Today, African Americans can freely exercise their
right to vote, and in communities where blacks were once barred
from the polls, blacks are elected to public offices. Millions of
blacks, too, have been lifted out of poverty as a result of the many
economic opportunities created by the civil rights movement. Also
important, the civil rights movement served as a model for the ad-
vancement of other minority groups, including women, the dis-
abled, gays, Hispanics, and many others.
Despite these gains, the civil rights movement fell short on
many counts, and the fight for equality is far from over. Yet the
black freedom struggle achieved something enduring: It pro-
foundly changed people’s attitudes and made the promise of
America if not a reality, at least a possibility.
W E
S
IN WORLD HISTORY
CHAPTER 1
How Did the

Fight for
Rights Begin?
S
E
Chapter Preface
L ong before the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s
was making headlines, the black response to oppression and
racial inequality was well under way. Indeed, while the failed
promise of emancipation in the latter half of the nineteenth cen-
tury gave rise to Jim Crow—a series of laws and customs that seg-
regated and disfranchised blacks—it also compelled a host of in-
dividuals to launch efforts to assert their constitutional rights and
improve their standing in society. Near the turn of the century,
for example, the outspoken crusader Ida B. Wells grappled with
one of the leading problems of her day: the lynching of black men.
Through a carefully orchestrated journalistic attack, Wells almost
singlehandedly brought this form of racial violence—certainly one
of the most trenchant symbols of white supremacy—to the fore-
front of the nation’s consciousness. Still others mobilized to cre-
ate the landmark organizations that would shape and support the
fight for rights: Marcus Garvey formed the Universal Negro Im-
provement Association in 1917 to promote his contention that
blacks should work for self-determination, an idea that prefigured
the black power movement of the 1960s. Similarly, in 1905,
W.E.B. Du Bois and others formed the Niagara Movement to ad-
dress black grievances, which led to the highly influential National
Association for the Advancement of Colored People—and the le-
gal assault on discrimination.
While these early black activists sought a similar prize—a more
equitable society—their means and goals were not always unified;
in some cases, their efforts to eliminate racial barriers were in di-
rect opposition to one another. For example, Booker T. Washing-
ton advocated vocational training and economic independence as
a tactical response, in part, to the southern agricultural economy.
Washington’s pragmatic approach, however, came under fire when
he told a predominantly white crowd in 1895, “In all things that
are purely social, we can be as separate as the fingers, yet one as the
hand in all things essential to mutual progress.” Washington’s crit-
ics, most notably W.E.B. Du Bois, denounced this apparent en-
22
HOW DID THE FIGHT FOR RIGHTS BEGIN ? 23
dorsement of segregation and willingness to forego black political

power. Unlike Washington, Du Bois, a Harvard-educated intel-
lectual, advocated the total transformation of black political and
cultural life.
The opposing viewpoints represented in the following chapter
reflect many of the same debates that would inform and shape the
later civil rights movement. At the same time, they show how a
cadre of dedicated individuals, despite a profusion of tactical and
ideological differences, set the stage for the all-out assault against
inequality that transformed the racial landscape of America.
Viewpoint 1
“The wisest among my race understand that the
agitation of questions of social equality is the
extremest folly.”
Blacks Should Not

Agitate for Civil
Rights
Booker T. Washington
Born a slave on a Virginia plantation, Booker T. Washington
rose to become one of the most influential black leaders of the
late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Early in his career,
Washington founded the Tuskegee Institute, a vocational school
that promoted industrial education and self-improvement as a
means of uplifting blacks. Yet it was Washington’s 1895 address
before the Atlanta Exposition that catapulted the renowned ed-
ucator into the national spotlight. His speech, reprinted here,
became one of the most influential—and controversial—ad-
dresses in American history.
Responding to the rise of Jim Crow, a system of laws and cus-
toms that disfranchised blacks, Washington, speaking before a
biracial audience, advocates a policy of accommodation on
racial issues, urging blacks to forego political and legal action in
Booker T. Washington, speech at the Atlanta Exposition, September 18, 1895.
24
favor of vocational training and work in industry. While many

praised Washington’s practical approach to racial problems,
critics soon emerged. Foremost of those to challenge Washing-
ton’s “Atlanta Compromise” was W.E.B. Du Bois, who found
that it compromised social equality by accommodating a deeply
entrenched system of racism.
M r. President and Gentlemen of the Board of Directors and

Citizens:
One-third of the population of the South is of the Negro race.
No enterprise seeking the material, civil, or moral welfare of this
section can disregard this element of our population and reach
the highest success. I but convey to you, Mr. President and Di-
rectors, the sentiment of the masses of my race when I say that in
no way have the value and manhood of the American Negro been
more fittingly and generously recognized than by the managers of
this magnificent exposition at every stage of its progress. It is a
recognition that will do more to cement the friendship of the two
races than any occurrence since the dawn of our freedom. Not
only this, but the opportunity here afforded will awaken among
us a new era of industrial progress. Ignorant and inexperienced,
it is not strange that in the first years of our new life we began at
the top instead of at the bottom; that a seat in Congress or the
state legislature was more sought than real estate or industrial skill;
that the political convention or stump speaking had more attrac-
tions than starting a dairy farm or truck garden.
A ship lost at sea for many days suddenly sighted a friendly ves-
sel. From the mast of the unfortunate vessel was seen a signal:
“Water, water; we die of thirst!” The answer from the friendly ves-
sel at once came back: “Cast down your bucket where you are.” A
second time the signal, “Water, water, send us water!” ran up from
the distressed vessel, and was answered: “Cast down your bucket
where you are.” And a third and fourth signal for water was an-
swered: “Cast down your bucket where you are.”
The captain of the distressed vessel, at last heeding the injunc-
tion, cast down his bucket, and it came up full of fresh, sparkling
water from the mouth of the Amazon River. To those of my race
who depend on bettering their condition in a foreign land or who

underestimate the importance of cultivating friendly relations
with the Southern white man, who is their next-door neighbor, I
would say: Cast down your bucket where you are; cast it down in
making friends, in every manly way, of the people of all races by
whom we are surrounded. Cast it down in agriculture, mechan-
ics, in commerce, in domestic service, and in the professions. And
in this connection it is well to bear in mind that whatever other
sins the South may be called to bear, when it comes to business,
pure and simple, it is in the South that the Negro is given a man’s
chance in the commercial world, and in nothing is this exposition
more eloquent than in emphasizing this chance.
Our greatest danger is that, in the great leap from slavery to free-
dom, we may overlook the fact that the masses of us are to live by
the productions of our hands and fail to keep in mind that we
shall prosper in proportion as we learn to dignify and glorify com-
mon labor, and put brains and skill into the common occupations
of life; shall prosper in proportion as we learn to draw the line be-
tween the superficial and the substantial, the ornamental gewgaws
of life and the useful. No race can prosper till it learns that there
is as much dignity in tilling a field as in writing a poem. It is at the
bottom of life we must begin, and not at the top. Nor should we
permit our grievances to overshadow our opportunities.
To those of the white race who look to the incoming of those of
foreign birth and strange tongue and habits for the prosperity of
the South, were I permitted I would repeat what I say to my own
race, “Cast down your bucket where you are.” Cast it down
among the 8 million Negroes whose habits you know, whose fi-
delity and love you have tested in days when to have proved
treacherous meant the ruin of your firesides. Cast down your
bucket among these people who have, without strikes and labor
wars, tilled your fields, cleared your forests, builded your railroads
and cities, and brought forth treasures from the bowels of the
earth and helped make possible this magnificent representation
of the progress of the South. Casting down your bucket among
my people, helping and encouraging them as you are doing on
these grounds, and, with education of head, hand, and heart, you
will find that they will buy your surplus land, make blossom the
waste places in your fields, and run your factories.

While doing this, you can be sure in the future, as in the past,
that you and your families will be surrounded by the most patient,
faithful, law-abiding, and unresentful people that the world has
seen. As we have proved our loyalty to you in the past, in nursing
your children, watching by the sickbed of your mothers and fa-
thers, and often following them with tear-dimmed eyes to their
graves, so in the future, in our humble way, we shall stand by you
with a devotion that no foreigner can approach, ready to lay down
our lives, if need be, in defense of yours; interlacing our industrial,
commercial, civil, and religious life with yours in a way that shall
make the interests of both races one. In all things that are purely
social we can be as separate as the fingers, yet one as the hand in
all things essential to mutual progress.
Development for All

There is no defense or security for any of us except in the highest
intelligence and development of all. If anywhere there are efforts
tending to curtail the fullest growth of the Negro, let these efforts
be turned into stimulating, encouraging, and making him the
most useful and intelligent citizen. Effort or means so invested will
pay a thousand percent interest. These efforts will be twice
blessed—“blessing him that gives and him that takes.”
There is no escape, through law of man or God, from the in-
evitable:
The laws of changeless justice bind
Oppressor with oppressed;
And dose as sin and suffering joined
We march to fate abreast
Nearly 16 millions of hands will aid you in pulling the load up-
ward, or they will pull against you the load downward. We shall
constitute one-third and more of the ignorance and crime of the
South, or one-third its intelligence and progress; we shall con-
tribute one-third to the business and industrial prosperity of the
South, or we shall prove a veritable body of death, stagnating, de-
pressing, retarding every effort to advance the body politic.
Gentlemen of the exposition, as we present to you our humble
effort at an exhibition of our progress, you must not expect over-

much. Starting thirty years ago with ownership here and there in
a few quilts and pumpkins and chickens (gathered from miscel-
laneous sources), remember: the path that has led from these to
the invention and production of agricultural implements, bug-
gies, steam engines, newspapers, books, statuary, carving, paint-
ings, the management of drugstores and banks, has not been trod-
den without contact with thorns and thistles. While we take pride
in what we exhibit as a result of our independent efforts, we do
not for a moment forget that our part in this exhibition would fall
far short of your expectations but for the constant help that has
come to our educational life, not only from the Southern states
but especially from Northern philanthropists who have made their
gifts a constant stream of blessing and encouragement.
The wisest among my race understand that the agitation of ques-
tions of social equality is the extremest folly, and that progress in
the enjoyment of all the privileges that will come to us must be the
result of severe and constant struggle rather than of artificial forc-
ing. No race that has anything to contribute to the markets of the
world is long in any degree ostracized. It is important and right that
all privileges of the law be ours, but it is vastly more important that
we be prepared for the exercise of these privileges. The opportu-
nity to earn a dollar in a factory just now is worth infinitely more
than the opportunity to spend a dollar in an opera house.
A Pledge to Cooperate
In conclusion, may I repeat that nothing in thirty years has given
us more hope and encouragement and drawn us so near to you of
the white race as this opportunity offered by the exposition; and
here bending, as it were, over the altar that represents the results
of the struggles of your race and mine, both starting practically
empty-handed three decades ago, I pledge that, in your effort to
work out the great and intricate problem which God has laid at
the doors of the South, you shall have at all times the patient, sym-
pathetic help of my race; only let this be constantly in mind that,
while from representations in these buildings of the product of
field, of forest, of mine, of factory, letters, and art, much good will
come—yet far above and beyond material benefits will be that
higher good, that let us pray God will come, in a blotting out of
sectional differences and racial animosities and suspicions, in a
determination to administer absolute justice, in a willing obedi-
ence among all classes to the mandates of law. This, coupled with
our material prosperity, will bring into our beloved South a new
heaven and a new earth.
Viewpoint 2
“If we remember the history of all great reform
movements, we remember that they have been
preceded by agitation.”
Blacks Should Agitate

for Civil Rights
W.E.B. Du Bois
As the black freedom struggle was gaining strength at the turn
of the century, W.E.B. Du Bois was well on his way to becoming
the nation’s preeminent black intellectual and spokesperson.
Born a free black man just after the end of the Civil War, Du
Bois became the first black man to graduate from Harvard and
went on to help found the influential National Association for
the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the organi-
zation’s widely read journal, the Crisis.
A prolific scholar and outspoken political leader, Du Bois ex-
posed the black experience perhaps more profoundly than any
leader of his day. In his writings and speeches, Du Bois not only
pointed out the social and psychological ramifications of racial
injustice, but also advocated vigorous protest as a means of ad-
vancing social equality—an approach that ran counter to
Booker T. Washington’s accommodation strategy. In the fol-
lowing 1907 speech, Du Bois, who viewed accommodation as
acquiescence in blacks’ second-class citizenship, explains why
agitation is a powerful weapon in the fight for black rights.
W.E.B. Du Bois, speech, The Voice of the Negro, vol. 4, March 1907.
30
T here are those people in the world who object to agitation and
one cannot wholly blame them. Agitation, after all, is un-
pleasant. It means that while you are going peaceably and joyfully
on your way some half-mad person insists upon saying things that
you do not like to hear. They may be true, but you do not like to
hear them. You would rather wait till some convenient season; or
you take up your newspaper and instead of finding pleasant no-
tices about your friends and the present progress of the world, you
read of some restless folks who insist on talking about wrong and
crime and unpleasant things. It would be much better if we did
not have to have agitation; if we had a world where everything was
going so well and it was unnecessary often to protest strongly,
even wildly, of the evil and the wrong of the universe. As a matter
of fact, however, no matter how unpleasant the agitator is, and no
matter how inconvenient and unreasonable his talk, yet we must
ever have him with us. And why? Because this is a world where
things are not all right. We are gifted with human nature, which
does not do the right or even desire the right always. So long as
these things are true, then we are faced by this dilemma: either we
must let the evil alone and refuse to hear of it or listen to it or we
must try and right it. Now, very often it happens that the evil is
there, the wrong has been done, and yet we do not hear of it—we
do not know about it. Here then comes the agitator. He is the her-
ald—he is the prophet—he is the man that says to the world:
“There are evils which you do not know; but which I know, and
you must listen to them.” Now, of course, there may be agitators
who are telling the truth and there may be agitators who are telling
untruths. Those who are not telling the truth may be lying or they
may be mistaken. So that agitation in itself does not necessarily
mean always the right and always reform.
Here, then, is some one who thinks that he has discovered some
dangerous evil and wants to call the attention of good men of the
world to it. If he does not persevere, we may perhaps pass him by.
If he is easily discouraged, we may perhaps think that the evil
which he thought he saw has been cured. But if he is sincere and
if he is persistent, then there is but one thing for a person to do
who wants to live in a world worth living in; that is, listen to him
carefully, prove his tale and then try and right the wrong.
Other Reform Movements

If we remember the history of all great reform movements, we re-
member that they have been preceded by agitation. Take, for in-
stance, the suppression of the slave trade. It was in a day when
slavery could not be successfully attacked. But there was no doubt
of the horrors of the slave trade. The best and worst of people alike
admitted that. Here came a young man just graduated from col-
lege. By writing a prize essay he found himself interested in this
great evil. He began to know and learn of things which other
people did not know. Not that they knew nothing about them, but
they had not brought together all the facts. One isolated person
knew that fact and one knew this fact, but no one person knew
both facts in juxtaposition. When they did become acquainted
with all the facts he was sure that they must be moved to act. What
then must he do? He must agitate. It was not pleasant—it was
putting himself in jeopardy; he was called upon to lose friends in
some cases, and in all cases to make himself unpleasant, insistent,
persistent, telling of things that people did not want to hear about,
because they were not interested in them. He must interest people
in things in which they were not interested before, which is a hard
task in this busy world; and yet, nevertheless, if [Thomas] Clark-
son [pioneer British abolitionist] had not persisted, we would have
much less than a chance to agitate for human rights today.
So it is with all great movements. They must be preceded by ag-
itation. In the present status of the Negro it is particularly neces-
sary that we today make the world realize what his position is—
make them realize that he is not merely insisting on ornamental
rights, and neglecting plain duties, but that the rights we want are
the rights that are necessary, inevitable before we can rightly do
our duties.
Mrs. [Charlotte] Gilman [an influential suffragist and reformer]
has a poem somewhere, where she speaks of that rule which is to
be laid down in the great future state, “Unless a man works, he
may not eat,” and she says very aptly that “the cart is before the
horse,” because “unless a man eats he cannot work.” So to those
people who are saying to black men today, “Do your duties first,
and then clamor for rights,” we have a right to answer and to an-
swer insistently, that the rights we are clamoring for are those that
will enable us to do our duties. That we cannot possibly be asked

to do any partial measure of our duty even, unless we can have
those rights and have them now. We realize this. The great mass
of people in the United States do not realize it. What then are we
to do? We may sit in courteous and dumb self-forgetting silence
until other people are interested and come to our rescue. But is it
reasonable to suppose that this is going to happen before degen-
eration and destruction overtake us? This is a busy world. People
are attending to their own affairs as they ought to. The man that
has a grievance is supposed to speak for himself. No one can speak
for him—no one knows the thing as well as he does. Therefore it
is reasonable to say that if the man does not complain that it is be-
cause he has no complaint. If a man does not express his needs,
then it is because his needs are filled. And it has been our great
mistake in the last decade that we have been silent and still and
have not complained when it was our duty not merely to ourselves
but to our country and to humanity in general to complain and
to complain loudly. It is, then, high time that the Negro agitator
should be heard in the land.
It is not a pleasant role to play. It is not always pleasant to nice
ears to hear a man ever coming with his dark facts and unpleas-
ant conditions. Nevertheless it is the highest optimism to bring
forward the dark side of any human picture. When a man does
this he says to the world, “Things are bad, but it is worthwhile to
let the world know that things are bad in order that they may be-
come better.” The real crushing pessimism takes hold of the world
when people say things are so bad that they are not worth com-
plaining of, because they cannot be made better.
Complain Loudly
It is manifest that within the last year the whole race in the United
States has awakened to the fact that they have lost ground and
must start complaining and complain loudly. It is their business
to complain.
This complaint should be made with reason and with strict re-
gard to the truth, but nevertheless it should be made. And it is in-
teresting to find even those persons who were deriding complaint
a few years ago joining in the agitation today.
We of Niagara Movement [a civil rights protest organization

founded in 1905 and the direct forerunner of the National Asso-
ciation for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP)] wel-
come them. We are glad of help from all sources. We are con-
firmed in our belief that if a man stand up and tell the thing he
wants and point out the evil around him, that this is the best way
to get rid of it. May we not hope, then, that we are going to have
in the next century a solid front on the part of colored people in
the United States saying we want education for our children and
we do not have it today in any large measure; we want full politi-
cal rights, and we never have had that; we want to be treated as
human beings; and we want those of our race who stand on the
threshold and within the veil of crime to be treated not as beasts,
but as men who can be reformed or as children who can be pre-
vented from going further in their career.
If we all stand and demand this insistently, the nation must lis-
ten to the voice of ten millions.
Viewpoint 3
“This Washington brand of black leadership would
. . . neglect the quest for full-fledged citizenship
status and human rights.”
Booker T.
Washington’s
Leadership
Was Flawed
Martin Kilson
As one of the nation’s chief black spokespersons, Booker
T. Washington stood at the forefront of race relations in
nineteenth-century America. In his assessment of post-
Reconstruction race leadership, Martin Kilson contends that
Washington engendered only miniscule black advancement.
Instead, Washington too narrowly focused on social system de-
velopment, or rather bolstering those agencies, networks, and
institutions that would spur black social development. Accord-
ing to Kilson, this strategy was ineffective not only because it
failed to address the second-class citizenship status and human
rights parity of African Americans, but also because it relied too
heavily on the role of whites in bestowing economic and educa-
tional opportunity. Martin Kilson is a research professor at Har-
Martin Kilson, “The Washington and Du Bois Leadership Paradigms Recon-
sidered,” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science,
vol. 568, March 2000. Copyright © 2000 by Sage Publications, Inc. Repro-
duced by permission.
35
vard University and the author and coauthor of several books,

including The Making of Black Intellectuals: Studies on the
African American Intelligentsia. The following viewpoint is ex-
cerpted from an article that originally appeared in the Annals of
the American Academy of Political and Social Science.
O ne function [of leadership] can be characterized by the term

that anthropologists often use—social organization. That is,
leadership is concerned with fashioning the nuts and bolts of a so-
cial system, the infrastructure of agencies and networks that allow
individuals and a people as a whole to realize the purposes re-
quired for a viable human existence. Thus, one core type of lead-
ership we can call social organization type leadership.
A second function of leadership is to offer guidance and goals
for a community, to direct a community to certain ends and pur-
poses. This leadership function is concerned with a group’s sta-
tus, rights, and honor. This second core type of leadership we can
call guidance type or mobilization type leadership. It is from this
second type of leadership in a modern nation-state society that
political leadership evolves, whether activist or social movement
leadership or elected politician leadership.
In general, for African Americans the end of Reconstruction and
the imposition of racial caste marginalization of black citizens in
American society placed a barrier to the natural growth of guid-
ance or mobilization type leadership. Within the South, where the
vast majority of African Americans resided between the 1890s and
the 1950s, mobilization type leadership was extremely limited, ag-
gressively restricted by the authoritarian white racist patterns. For
example, by 1940 only 5 percent of the adult black population in
the South had been allowed to become registered voters. White vi-
olence and white bureaucratic coercion were employed to impose
this lowest level participation ceiling on African American citizens.
As a result, a massive federal government intervention was re-
quired to alter this situation (which finally came with the Voting
Rights Act of 1965), and meanwhile the majority community of
African Americans in the South had to resort to that more pri-
mary (or embryonic) form of leadership that I call social organi-
zation leadership. Indeed, a variant of social organization leader-

ship was articulated along systemic lines by the most prominent
African American political figure in the South from the late 1880s
to his death in 1915. That figure was Booker T. Washington.
The Washington Leadership Paradigm

If we could magically transport ourselves back 100 years or so to
Atlanta, Georgia, in 1895, we would have experienced an ex-
traordinary event. That event would shape the metamorphosis of
African American leadership processes—and thus the processes
of black political incorporation in American life—for the first four
generations of the twentieth century.
The extraordinary event I refer to was the presence of Booker
T. Washington at a capitalist industrial exposition. As a keynote
speaker at the 1895 Atlanta Exposition, Washington told an au-
dience of white entrepreneurs—the leading figures of an explod-
ing American industrial capitalism—that all they had to worry
about in regard to a troublesome American working class was the
white working class. As Washington was well aware, the white
Influential civil rights leader Booker T. Washington addresses a large crowd.

Many of Washington’s colleagues criticized his strategy on black advancement.
working class had or could bid for full citizenship status (they
were within the American social contract) and thus could partic-
ipate in helping to define the emergent industrial nation-state’s
public purposes.
But what about the black working class? Above all, the black
working class was outside the American social contract—and bru-
tally outside it at that. Most (over 90 percent) of the African Amer-
ican working class was an oppressed agrarian proletariat whom his-
torians, cognizant of its dilapidated attributes, labeled a peonage
agrarian class. In other words, the African American working class
was not just overwhelmed by massive social oppression but over-
whelmed as well by judicial, police, and political oppression. The
cruelest kind of systemic oppression under capitalism was endured
by the southern branch of the black working class—perhaps one-
third of whom faced the horrible experience of prison labor under
vicious white superintendence from the 1890s to the 1950s, or,
nearly as bad, they experienced the terrible threat of imprisonment
for the purpose of becoming prison labor.
Booker T. Washington’s message to the assembled industrial
capitalists was at the other end of the political spectrum from what
that young African American who was just finishing his doctorate
at Harvard University in 1895—W.E.B. Du Bois—would have told
the Atlanta Exposition participants had he been invited to it. In di-
rect reference to that core query—how do you lead black people?—
Booker T. Washington’s Atlanta Exposition speech belittled the
possibility of using politics to advance African American needs,
concerns, and status in a raucously evolving industrial capitalism.
He said, “Start . . . a dairy farm or truck garden” instead. Raising
his two hands, Washington proclaimed that, in matters of politi-
cal rights and status, whites and blacks would be as “separate as the
fingers on my hands.” In short, Washington’s address rejected the
guidance type or mobilization type leadership model, favoring in-
stead the social organization type leadership model.
The Role of Whites

From these groundwork propositions, then, Washington sought
to strike a bargain with America’s captains of industry and,
through them, with America’s operational authoritarian white su-
premacist overrule of some 10 million black people. Washington

opined that if the white elites and leadership would funnel finan-
cial and institutional resources to what I call his social organiza-
tion type black leadership, this Washington brand of black lead-
ership would, on one hand, advance the African American social
system while, on the other hand, neglect the quest for full-fledged
citizenship status and human rights—rights that were by 1895
some 30 years old, enshrined in the Constitution on pain of a
bloody Civil War and elaborated by federal legislation known as
the Civil Rights Codes of 1865, 1866, and 1867. In The Future of
the American Negro, Booker T. Washington presents his accom-
modationist formulations:
I believe the past and present teach but one lesson—to the
Negro’s [white] friends and to the Negro himself—that there
is but one hope of solution; and that is for the Negro in every
part of America to resolve from henceforth that he will throw
aside every non-essential [citizenship and human rights] and
cling only to essential—that his pillar of fire by night and pil-
lar of cloud by day shall be property, economy, education,
and Christian character. To us just now these are the wheat,
all else the chaff.
There was in Washington’s accommodationist schema no
timetable for the establishment of African American citizenship
and human rights parity. Gunnar Myrdal’s classic appraisal of
African American citizenship status as of the middle 1940s states
that, “Through thrift, skill, and industry the Negroes were grad-
ually to improve so much that, at a later stage, the discussion again
could be taken up concerning his rights. This was Washington’s
philosophy.”
Booker T. Washington was not, of course, a simpleton. He knew
that if he could get the American elites in 1895 to generate finan-
cial and material resources to advance blacks in education, job op-
portunities, and neighborhood development, this very process of
social system development would inevitably converge with the
American political system. He also knew that, given his autocratic
leadership style, he would be the top client type or errand boy
black leadership figure.
Alas, even though the American elites of the nineteenth and

early twentieth centuries with whom Washington interacted never
even approximated generating the material resources for African
American modernization that Washington’s compromise formula
implied, Washington nevertheless evolved to that unique and cu-
rious role as top client type black leader. So whatever the inade-
quate supply of financial and material resources from white elites
for African American modernization was, Booker T. Washington
exercised an inordinate sway over its allocation among blacks.
Washington’s top client type black leader role also saw him func-
tioning as the main advisor among African American leadership
to President Theodore Roosevelt and President William Taft on
those torturous issues related to blacks’ authoritarian-delineated
interface with the American social contract.
What were the salient political issues requiring Washington’s
advice? (1) voting rights or rather the steady and cynical disen-
franchisement of African Americans well into the twentieth cen-
tury; (2) pervasive institutional discrimination and/or segregation
toward blacks throughout American life; and (3) massive, perni-
cious violence against blacks generally and against any particular
black citizen the perpetrators of white supremacist violence
wished to target. Such violence was often taken to the point of tak-
ing a black life, by mob lynching or police brutality, the wretched
tale of which is related more effectively in Gunnar Myrdal’s An
American Dilemma (1944) than in many other sources.
A Failed Bargain
Thus, what historians have labeled the accommodationist leader-
ship method of Booker T. Washington produced at best sparse and
problematic social system advancement—social organization
metamorphosis—for the typical African American citizen by, say,
World War I. At the time of Washington’s death in 1915, over 90
percent of the 11 million blacks in the United States were still mas-
sively poor. The so-called bargain that Washington struck with
white elites in regard to opening up industrial job markets for the
black working class was an utter failure because the white capital-
ist class made no serious effort to incorporate African American
workers at parity with white workers. Neither was the other half of
Washington’s so-called bargain with white elites any more suc-

cessful—the goal of educating the illiterate offspring of slaves
through the special financial and resource assistance of white elites.
The bulk of the southern black population remained wretchedly
educated by the 1930s.
Finally, while full credit belongs to Booker T. Washington for
his important contributions to the development of the African
American professional class or intelligentsia—with Washington
himself founding a key black institution of higher education,
Tuskegee Institute—this important class within the African Amer-
ican social system was minuscule at the time of Washington’s
death in 1915. Nor was the black professional stratum any more
fulsome by the start of World War II, mainly because the white
elites in general and the white capitalist class in particular failed
to keep its pathetic Faustian bargain with Booker T. Washington
that commenced with his Atlanta Exposition address in 1895.
In opting for the social organization type black leadership,
Washington painted himself and African Americans generally into
a leadership cul-de-sac. And had Washington lived perhaps one
more generation, the devastating impact of his leadership cul-de-
sac in regard to constraining the growth of the guidance type or
mobilization type black leadership would have been unbearable.
Viewpoint 4
“[Washington] addressed the most pressing needs
of black Southerners and showed them a way of
coping with their situation, and even prospering,
in a climate of extreme racism.”
Booker T.
Washington’s
Leadership
Was Effective
Adam Fairclough
Civil rights scholar Adam Fairclough hails Booker T. Washing-
ton as a successful and farsighted leader who, whatever his limi-
tations, remained committed to racial equality and ultimately
engendered conditions that promoted black progress. Washing-
ton’s Tuskegee Institute, for example, was an impressive symbol
of black gains—and not a repressive machine that kept blacks
mired in second-class citizenry. Too, Washington’s attempts to
dismantle racism by making blacks indispensable to the southern
economy—a strategy bitterly criticized by many of his contem-
poraries—was indeed relevant to Washington’s time as it specifi-
cally addressed the needs of the South’s agricultural industry.
In his final analysis, Fairclough concludes that Washington
Adam Fairclough, “Booker T. Washington and the Strategy of Accommoda-

tion,” Better Day Coming: Blacks and Equality, 1890–2000. New York:
Viking, 2001. Copyright © 2001 by Adam Fairclough. All rights reserved. Re-
produced by permission of Viking, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
42
has been judged too harshly by his critics. Despite his apparent
endorsement of segregation and his refusal to agitate, Washing-
ton was not an exemplar of white racist complicity as is so often
charged; rather, he offered a beacon of hope to otherwise dis-
franchised blacks as he paved the way for future civil rights ad-
vances. Fairclough has written extensively on the civil rights era.
He is the author of Better Day Coming: Blacks and Equaltiy,
1890–2000, from which the following is excerpted.
B orn in a squalid cabin in Virginia in 1856, the son of a white

man whose identity he never knew, Booker Taliaferro Wash-
ington was a legendary American success story: his autobiogra-
phy, Up from Slavery, has never been out of print. Through sheer
ability and force of character, Washington lifted himself from the
depths of bondage to the pinnacle of world fame. A living refuta-
tion of America’s degrading image of black people, he created
Tuskegee Institute, a black school in Alabama that symbolized the
achievement and potential of his race. In addition, his unflagging
efforts to mend the rift between black and white earned him the
reputation of statesman as well as educator. Between 1895, the
date of his famous speech to the Atlanta Cotton States and In-
dustrial Exposition, and 1915, the year of his death, Washington
was the most powerful black leader in America.
The Atlanta Compromise

In his Atlanta Exposition address, Washington proposed a new
settlement between the races in the South. Economic cooperation,
he argued, should supersede political conflict. He asked for just
treatment from white Southerners and offered two concessions
on behalf of his fellow blacks.
Washington’s first concession was the admission that Radical
Reconstruction had been a mistake. Blacks had started freedom “at
the top instead of at the bottom,” devoting too much energy to
politics and neglecting the skills and habits of industry that would
enable them to earn a decent living. The second concession to
white opinion was an assurance that blacks were not at all inter-
ested in “social equality.” What social equality meant was not clear,
but it obviously included intermarriage and sexual relations, and

many whites read it as a general endorsement of racial segregation.
Having verbally eliminated the basic causes of racial antago-
nism—apart from racism itself, to which he referred in only the
most oblique terms—Washington put forward a positive program
for economic cooperation. He urged blacks to stay in the South,
concentrate on working hard rather than agitating for their rights,
and cultivate “friendly relations with the Southern white man.”
Whites, for their part, should regard blacks as an economic asset
rather than a political threat, according them fair treatment as
loyal workers. If whites treated blacks justly instead of oppressing
them, Washington promised, “we shall stand by you with a de-
votion that no foreigner can match.” If blacks and whites worked
together, while at the same time acknowledging each other’s racial
integrity, the South’s economic prosperity would be assured, and
both races would share in it. “In all things that are purely social
we can be as separate as the fingers, yet as one hand in all things
essential to mutual progress.”
Hailed by both races as an expression of farsighted wisdom,
Washington’s “Atlanta Compromise” marked the beginning of a
new era in race relations. However, as the nineteenth century gave
way to the twentieth, and the oppression of black people did not
abate, Washington became the object of bitter censure by a small
but influential black minority. The Atlanta Compromise, these
critics charged, was not a compromise at all: blacks made all the
concessions and whites gave nothing in return. Indeed, because
the Atlanta Compromise appeared to usher in the consolidation
of white supremacy, some charged that Washington had betrayed
the Negro race to its enemies.
That judgment was far too harsh. Whatever his limitations,
Washington struggled with great energy and integrity to keep alive
the ideal of racial equality at a time when blacks were being sub-
jected to the most intensive ideological assault on their humanity
that they had ever experienced. His persistent and largely futile
campaign to persuade whites to spell “Negro” with a capital “N”
typified his insistence that black people deserved respect. So did
his refusal, when he controlled the New York Age, to carry adver-
tisements for hair straighteners and skin lighteners. However
much Washington compromised in politics, he never conceded

the arguments of white racists.
Although some white Southerners heaped praise upon Wash-
ington, others suspected that he was a Trojan Horse for racial
equality. Many were outraged when Washington dined with Pres-
ident Theodore Roosevelt at the White House in 1901. The inci-
dent betrayed Washington’s “deep down antipathy to white su-
premacy,” complained an Arkansas schools superintendent. “Afar
off he sees a vision of equality,” warned Ben Tillman of South Car-
olina. “The action of President Roosevelt in entertaining that nig-
ger will necessitate our killing a thousand niggers in the South be-
fore they will learn their place again.”
Such comments contained a basic insight. Washington’s ethic
of hard work, self-improvement, and Christian morality may
strike us as apolitical and excessively individualistic, yet those very
virtues, Washington believed, would “give the lie to the assertion
of his enemies North and South that the Negro is the inferior of
the white man.” The average Negro child, he insisted, was the in-
tellectual equal of the average white child. In his autobiography
Washington struck a note of almost defiant moral superiority:
From any point of view, I had rather be what I am, a member
of the Negro race, than be able to claim membership with the
most favoured of any other race. I have always been made sad
when I have heard members of any race claiming rights and
privileges . . . on the ground simply that they were members
of this or that race, regardless of their own individual worth
or attainments. . . . Every persecuted individual and race
should get much consolation out of the great human law,
which is universal and eternal, that merit, no matter under
what skin found, is, in the long run, recognized and rewarded.
This I have said here, not to call attention to myself as an in-
dividual, but to the race to which I am proud to belong.
Washington’s own attainments defied the conventional wisdom
that black people were inherently inferior.
Washington’s fame, as well as his strategy for black progress,
rested upon Tuskegee Institute and the idea it represented.
Tuskegee Institute was an impressive achievement. Arriving in Al-
abama in 1881, Washington transformed a few tumble-down

shacks in an Alabama field into a gleaming school of solid red
brick (the bricks were fired by the students themselves in
Tuskegee’s own kiln). A tireless fundraiser who spent several
months each year on the road cultivating Northern benefactors,
he built up a $2 million endowment and acquired thousands of
acres of land for the school.
Tuskegee Institute was staffed and administered entirely by
black people: Washington insisted upon it. “I knew that . . . we
were trying an experiment—that of testing whether or not it was
possible for Negroes to build up and control the affairs of a large
educational institution.” In creating a black-run school, Wash-
ington made a statement about racial equality that was far more
powerful than words. “Tuskegee alone is the fruit of a black man’s
heart and brain and effort and administrative skill,” wrote Roscoe
Conkling Bruce, one of its teachers. “Tuskegee Institute is . . .
proof of the black man’s capacity for the tasks of civilization.”
Washington made Tuskegee Institute the most famous Negro
school in the world. To black people in America, and to black
Africans and West Indians as well, Tuskegee was a proud symbol
of what their race could achieve. It was a beacon of hope.
Tuskegee was more than a school: it also represented a philos-
ophy of racial progress through education. The “Tuskegee Idea”
was this: The vast majority of blacks were not going to better their
position by means of politics, protest, or higher learning. Their
salvation lay in mastering basic work skills and applying them,
with honest sweat, to the demands of the South’s agricultural
economy. Four-fifths of the South’s black population lived in the
rural areas; most of them farmed white-owned land as renters or
sharecroppers. Whatever their hardships and problems, therefore,
blacks in the South began life with one inestimable advantage:
Whites needed their labor. Building upon this foundation, they
would be able to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps.
Washington envisaged them becoming landowners, artisans, and
small businessmen.
In stressing the economic opportunities available to blacks who
worked hard and possessed the right skills, Washington persis-
tently downplayed white racism. Yes, he told a New York audi-
ence in 1890, he knew all about lynching, ballot-box stuffing, and

intimidation: the reports were “generally true.” But he pointed to
“an absence of prejudice against the colored man in the South in
the matter of business that counts for a great deal.” Blacks could
utilize white self-interest as the “entering wedge” to equality. If
they proved themselves to be loyal, willing, and efficient workers,
if they made themselves indispensable to the Southern economy,
whites would respect them and treat them fairly. Blacks would
erode white prejudice just as the action of water makes rough
stones smooth. In time, whites would willingly accord them full
citizenship rights, including the right to vote.
“Industrial education,” Washington believed, would best pre-
pare blacks for surviving and prospering in the New South. As ap-
plied to the education of freedmen by Washington’s mentor,
Samuel Chapman Armstrong, the former missionary and Union
general who founded Hampton Institute in Virginia, industrial
education meant teaching practical skills in agriculture and the
“mechanic arts” that would equip blacks to earn a living in the ru-
ral South. The regime at Hampton Institute, and later at Tuskegee
Institute, required all students to perform manual labor about the
school: cooking, cleaning, farming, printing, building, gardening,
and so on. Such labor enabled Washington to build and maintain
Tuskegee on the cheap, and helped impecunious students to work
their way through school. But manual labor also served a higher
moral purpose: “The students themselves would be taught to see
not only utility in labour, but beauty and dignity; would be taught
. . . how to lift labour up from mere drudgery and toil, and would
learn to love work for its own sake.” Industrial education did not
train blacks to enter industry, but rather taught them to be in-
dustrious. To reinforce this character-building mission, both
Hampton and Tuskegee subjected students to strict rules and
military-style discipline.
Hampton and Tuskegee deliberately distinguished themselves
from the many colleges and universities established in the South
after the Civil War by Northern churches and missionary soci-
eties. Although these institutions had done pioneering work in ed-
ucating the freedmen, and had trained the first generation of
Southern black teachers, they were ill-suited to the needs of the
black population as a whole. In reality, the black universities were

mainly elementary and secondary schools, with only a handful of
students taking college-level courses. Yet, emulating the colleges
of New England, they laid great stress on the classics, modern lan-
guages, and other staples of nineteenth-century higher education.
Many whites, and some blacks, criticized the black universities for
being pretentious and overambitious, complaining that their rar-
efied curriculum equipped blacks to be teachers, preachers, and
politicians, but had little to offer the toiling masses. It had been
folly to begin “at the apex of the educational fabric instead of at
the base,” wrote T. Thomas Fortune in 1884; money had been lav-
ished on black colleges when “ordinary common schools were un-
known.” Blacks in the South were most in need of elementary and
individual education—“preparation for the actual work of life.”
Hampton and Tuskegee attempted to fill that need. Pointedly,
they did not teach Latin or Greek, nor did they offer degrees.
Washington’s Opponents
A host of black critics, and generations of historians, have lamented
Washington’s influence over black education. Samuel Chapman
Armstrong, they argue, conceived of industrial education as a
means of adjusting blacks to a subordinate position in the New
South. “He believed that blacks should be taught to remain in their
place,” writes historian Donald Spivey, to “stay out of politics, keep
quiet about their rights, and work.” Industrial education meant,
in practice, training blacks for nothing better than low-grade, low-
paid jobs, equipping them to be cooks, servants, sharecroppers,
and laborers—the “hewers of wood and drawers of waters” so
beloved of Southern whites. True, Hampton Institute trained its
students to be teachers, not farmers or laborers; so did Tuskegee
Institute. By molding black teachers, however, Armstrong at-
tempted to mold the black masses. Booker T. Washington, his star
pupil, absorbed his ideas and perpetuated them at Tuskegee, which
trained further cohorts of conservative teachers. Spivey likened
Washington to the black slave-driver who, “given the position of
authority over his fellow slaves, worked diligently to keep intact the
very system under which they both were enslaved.”
What angered Washington’s opponents was not so much the
idea of “industrial education” itself—there was widespread agree-

ment that black children would benefit from being taught practi-
cal skills—as the fear that blacks would be denied all but the most
rudimentary schooling, thereby perpetuating their second-class
citizenship. Washington vigorously denied that he sought to place
a ceiling upon black achievement. Yet his white supporters viewed
industrial education in precisely that way, and they used Wash-
ington’s ideas to justify a dual standard of education: a superior
one for whites and a grossly inferior one for blacks.
Washington disclaimed any hostility to higher education for
blacks, explaining simply that the great mass of the black popu-
lation required elementary and secondary school of a practical
bent. . . .
Washington’s Achievements
His most thorough biographer, Louis Harlan, portrayed Wash-
ington as a master manipulator whose relentless pursuit of power,
and skill at disguising his real emotions and opinions, produced
spiritual emptiness and political corruption. Washington emerges
from Harlan’s pages as a despotic, devious, and rather sinister fig-
ure—and above all as a failure. “Seeking to be all things to all men
. . . Washington ‘jumped Jim Crow’ with the skill of long practice,
but he seemed to lose sight of his dance.”
However, the Washington that looms across the massive bulk
of his collected papers—which, ironically, Harlan himself
edited—is an altogether different character. As historian Virginia
Denton has argued, far from showing a power-obsessed enigma,
Washington’s letters and speeches disclose a man unselfishly com-
mitted to the social, educational, and economic uplift of his race.
“Washington was dominated by purpose, not power,” Judged by
his best, Washington was an admirable leader. He addressed the
most pressing needs of black Southerners and showed them a way
of coping with their situation, and even prospering, in a climate
of extreme racism. Using a combination of flattery, persuasion,
and guile, he gradually wore down Southern white opposition to
black education. When blacks in the South were abandoned by
the Republican Party, Washington built alliances with Northern
capitalists and philanthropists. His much-criticized relationship
with President Roosevelt important symbolic value, for it told

Southern blacks that they had a foot in the White House door.
Washington’s economic vision strikes us as unrealistic. At a time
of pellmell urbanization, Washington urged blacks to stay in the
countryside. In an age of breakneck industrialization, he envis-
aged blacks as yeoman farmers, self-employed artisans, and inde-
pendent entrepreneurs. At the time, however, Washington’s mes-
sage did not seem irrelevant. To the emerging black middle class
of teachers and small businessmen it was an inspiration. To black
farmers, it offered a road map out of tenancy and debt. Indeed, by
1900, about one black farmer in four—some 193,000 people—
were landowners. They achieved this, moreover, despite Con-
gress’s refusal to apportion land to the freedmen, despite the ob-
stacle of discrimination, and despite a credit system hat made it
extremely difficult to accumulate capital. This golden age of agri-
culture did not last. Even at its height, blacks, who comprised 28
percent of the South’s farmers, accounted for only 14 percent of
the region’s farm owners. Moreover, the era of the small farmer
was drawing to a close. Washington failed to predict how eco-
nomic change, abetted by government policy, would completely
transform American agriculture. Still, he was hardly the only per-
son who lacked a crystal ball. Not even the experts predicted that
most farmers, white as well as black, would be swept from the land
in a matter of decades.
Washington’s reputation as a Victorian moralist who constantly
berated blacks for their shortcomings still persists. His priorities
were hardly misplaced, however. Washington sought to raise the
standards of people who had been denied legal marriage, refused
education, clothed in rags, and housed in squalor. His seeming
obsession with cleanliness, for example—famously exemplified
by his praise of the toothbrush as a civilizing influence—strikes
us today as ridiculous. In the context of his age, however, such
concerns were not so absurd. Reformers on both sides of the At-
lantic were vitally interested in sanitation and public health. Black
Americans suffered an especially high mortality rate: eliminating
dirt meant eliminating disease. Hygiene was a matter of life and
death. It was typical of Washington that after one visit to Fisk Uni-
versity, he complained to the president that the outhouses were
filthy and that the students had no place to bathe. His concern for
cleanliness led him to support Negro Health Week, launched at
Tuskegee in 1915, a major effort to reduce mortality in the black
community.
Washington criticized but never belittled the black community.
Blacks might be ignorant, he argued, but they were not degraded.
Far from being indolent, he told whites, “the masses of the col-
ored people work hard, but . . . someone else receives the profits.”
To those who alleged that blacks had little reverence for family
life, Washington pointed out that blacks took care of their de-
pendents to a greater degree, perhaps, than any other race. “In all
my experience in the South, I do not think I have ever seen a lit-
tle child suffering by reason of the fact that no one would take him
into his family.” While criticizing many black ministers for being
ignorant and immoral—valid criticisms—he praised the sincer-
ity and passion of black religious faith. Educated blacks often
cringed when Washington put on a thick dialect and told “darky”
stories. But Washington understood that blacks, like most groups,
were quite able to laugh at themselves if the joke were funny and
it came from the right person.
Conciliation
Did Washington concede too much? Did he, by his failure to join
the forces of protest, aid and abet the white supremacy move-
ment? Although only two states, Mississippi and South Carolina,
had actually disfranchised blacks by 1895, disfranchisement was
an unstoppable movement. As for segregation, blacks and whites
already lived separate social lives, hardly ever intermarried, wor-
shipped at separate churches, and attended separate schools. Sep-
aration was also the custom in saloons, hotels, restaurants, and
other public accommodations. These forms of separation, more-
over, were by and large accepted by blacks, some more grudgingly
than others. The main area of contention was public transporta-
tion: blacks bitterly resented being relegated to filthy railway car-
riages and assigned to the back seats of streetcars. Like disfran-
chisement, however, the onward march of Jim Crow was
irresistible. W.E.B. Du Bois, then a professor at Atlanta Univer-
sity who became Washington’s most influential critic, charged that
conciliation of the white South had made a bad situation worse.

On the other hand, Kelly Miller, who taught at Howard Univer-
sity, argued that “no human power could stay the wave of race ha-
tred now sweeping over the country.”
There is ample evidence that Washington harbored deep anger
about lynching, peonage, convict labor, Jim Crow laws, the neglect
of black schools, and what he called the “cancer of discrimination.”
As historian Donald J. Calista put it, “beneath his ingratiating man-
ner boiled a man filled with contempt for the injustices done to his
race by whites.” Behind the scenes, Washington fought disfran-
chisement, challenged railroad segregation, attacked peonage, and
opposed the exclusion of blacks from juries.
From Washington’s point of view, however, a strategy of open
protest—as practiced by Ida B. Wells, for example—would be bar-
ren of results and may even, by antagonizing white Southerners,
make life even more difficult for blacks in the South. “It takes
more courage, in my opinion, for one to keep his mouth closed
than to open it,” he once explained, “especially when he is a thou-
sand miles from the seat of real danger.” Washington knew the
precariousness of his own position, and that of Tuskegee Institute.
Despite Tuskegee’s relative independence, its autonomy was not
absolute; the state legislature could wreak serious damage if it
chose to do so. And no black person in the South, however well-
connected, was beyond reach of white retribution.
The cost of militancy was vividly illustrated by the experiences
of two other men who headed black colleges in Alabama. William
H. Councill, black president of State Normal and Industrial
School in Huntsville, was forced to resign in 1887 after he sued
the Atlantic Railroad Company for racial discrimination in evict-
ing him from a first-class carriage. In the same year, in the town
of Marion, black students from Colored University fought with
white students from Howard College, and black townspeople boy-
cotted white merchants. The Alabama legislature thereupon pun-
ished William B. Paterson, the white president of Colored Uni-
versity, by abolishing his school. Councill eventually got his job
back, and thereafter accorded Alabama’s Democrats unswerving
devotion. Paterson succeeded in reestablishing his school in
Montgomery, but the legislature denied it the name of “univer-
sity.” These happenings reinforced what Washington already

knew: if he forcefully and repeatedly criticized racial discrimina-
tion, his position in Alabama would become untenable.
Black Powerlessness
Washington then, was a product of black powerlessness. Black po-
litical leadership was headed toward extinction, and Washington
stepped into the opening vacuum. He proposed a strategy for
dealing with the unenviable situation in which black Southerners
found themselves. He tried to find a means whereby blacks could
find a secure economic niche in the New South, even if they had
to surrender their political rights and some of their civil rights.
Despite his conservatism, however, Washington never renounced
the ultimate goal of equality. He advocated a tactical retreat in or-
der to prepare the way for a strategic advance.
Yet did the gains secured by Washington justify the refusal to
protest, the abandoning of politics, and the apparent endorsement
of segregation? Many doubted it. Charles W. Chesnutt com-
plained to Washington that “you Southern educators are all
bound up with some special cause or other, devotion to which
sometimes warps your judgment as to what is best for the general
welfare of the race. Your institution, your system of education . . .
is apt to dwarf everything else and become the sole remedy for so-
cial and political evils which have a much wider basis.” Even
staunch ally T. Thomas Fortune felt uneasy about Washington’s
denigration of politics and lack of vigor in opposing disfran-
chisement. “It is not necessary to give away the whole political case
in order to propagate the industrial idea.”
Many blacks found Washington’s accommodationism deeply
humiliating. “If we are not striving for equality, in heaven’s name
for what are we living?” asked black teacher John Hope in 1896.
“If money, education, and honesty will not bring to me as much
privilege, as much equality as they bring to any American citizen,
then they are to me a curse, and not a blessing.” Even if Wash-
ington’s accomplishments are taken into account, therefore, they
need to be balanced by the psychological damage that the policy
of appeasing the white South may have inflicted upon both indi-
viduals and the race as a whole. As historian Lawrence J. Fried-
man has suggested, the “material gains may have been dwarfed
against the psychic gains he could have rendered blacks had he
been openly defiant and patently courageous.” Friedman also
speculated that his repression of anger and masking of feelings
“may have . . . inflicted physical as well as psychological damage”
upon Washington himself.
For many black Southerners, however, and for Washington
himself, the strategy of accommodation provided self-respect and
psychological comfort. Washington was correct in sensing that
few people could base their lives upon agitation and protest. Pro-
test meant defining oneself in opposition to whites, and continu-
ally dwelling upon the negative effects of discrimination. Nothing
was more frustrating and discouraging, moreover, than engaging
in protest when circumstances made it barren of results. To Wash-
ington, agitation wasted energy that could be better devoted to
self-improvement and racial uplift. “If one wants to be made to
feel real sick and disconsolate he needs but to share the experience
of sitting in an Afro-American meeting and hear two or three Ne-
gro speakers speak for two or three hours describing the ills of the
Negro race. . . . In some places the race makes no effort to go for-
ward in the direction that other races are working because it has
gotten into the habit of crying and can do nothing else.” Writing
to his daughter Portia, then studying in the North, he warned her
not to “dwell too much upon American prejudice, or any other
race prejudice. The thing is for one to get above such things.”
Washington’s message of self-help held such a powerful appeal to
many black Southerners, especially the middle class, because it co-
incided with aspirations and beliefs they already held.
Washington believed that he spoke to, and for, the black masses.
It was not such a vain delusion: he was the only black leader of his
age who could consistently attract large and enthusiastic audi-
ences. Writing in 1937, historian Horace Mann Bond tried to an-
alyze Washington’s appeal:
Those persons who have praised Booker T. Washington most
loudly in the past . . . by far underestimate him. To them Booker
T. Washington is a sort of mythical figure who preached hu-
mility and manual labor for Negroes. To me he is a man who
came to understand the American culture—and that of the

South—as no man before or since him could. More, in his life
and person he translated that understanding into action, by
means of a personality so rare and compelling that he could ap-
peal with equal force, not only to Northern financiers and schol-
ars, but also to the most illiterate Negroes in the lower South.
Not until Martin Luther King, Jr., achieved fame forty years later
would another Southern black leader command such influence
and popularity.
Viewpoint 5
“Negroes can build a mammoth machine of mass
action . . . that can shatter and crush the evil
fortress of race prejudice and hate.”
Civil Rights Can Be

Secured Through
Mass Action
A. Philip Randolph
A. Philip Randolph was the preeminent black labor leader of the
twentieth century. As president of the Brotherhood of Sleeping
Car Porters and later as a key figure in the civil rights move-
ment, Randolph fought throughout his career to bolster eco-
nomic and political rights for the black working class.
Randolph gained national prominence when World War II
exposed a new facet of the nation’s longstanding racial problem:
Nearly a million African Americans defended their country by
serving in the armed forces—where segregated units were a
grim reminder of Jim Crow. At the same time, blacks were ex-
cluded from all but the most menial defense industry jobs. To
compel the federal government to desegregate its defense indus-
tries, Randolph called on blacks to march on Washington on
July 1, 1941. His address, reprinted here, is taken from an article
A. Philip Randolph, “Call to Negro America to March on Washington for

Jobs and Equal Participation in National Defense on July 1, 1941,” The Black
Worker, May 14, 1941.
56
in the Black Worker, the publication of the Brotherhood of

Sleeping Car Porters.
Faced with the prospect of thousands of blacks marching on
Washington, D.C., President Franklin D. Roosevelt acquiesced
to Randolph’s demands and issued an executive order that pro-
hibited discrimination in the defense industries. Although the
July 1 march was called off, Randolph’s ideas on mass action
campaigns spawned much of the ideology that would later
dominate the civil rights movement.
W e call upon you to fight for jobs in National Defense.

We call upon you to struggle for the integration of Ne-
groes in the armed forces, such as the Air Corps, Navy, Army and
Marine Corps of the Nation.
We call upon you to demonstrate for the abolition of Jim-
Crowism in all Government departments and defense employ-
ment.
An Hour of Crisis
This is an hour of crisis. It is a crisis of democracy. It is a crisis of
minority groups. It is a crisis of Negro Americans.
What is this crisis?
To American Negroes, it is the denial of jobs in Government de-
fense projects. It is racial discrimination in Government depart-
ments. It is widespread Jim-Crowism in the armed forces of the
Nation.
While billions of the taxpayers’ money are being spent for war
weapons, Negro workers are being turned away from the gates of
factories, mines and mills—being flatly told, “NOTHING DO-
ING.” Some employers refuse to give Negroes jobs when they are
without “union cards,” and some unions refuse Negro workers
union cards when they are “without jobs.”
What shall we do?
What a dilemma!
What a runaround!
What a disgrace!
What a blow below the belt!
‘Though dark, doubtful and discouraging, all is not lost, all is

not hopeless. ‘Though battered and bruised, we are not beaten,
broken or bewildered.
Verily, the Negroes’ deepest disappointments and direst defeats,
their tragic trials and outrageous oppressions in these dreadful
days of destruction and disaster to democracy and freedom, and
the rights of minority peoples, and the dignity and independence
of the human spirit, is the Negroes’ greatest opportunity to rise to
the highest heights of struggle for freedom and justice in Govern-
ment, in industry, in labor unions, education, social service, reli-
gion and culture.
Self-Liberation
With faith and confidence of the Negro people in their own power
for self-liberation, Negroes can break down the barriers of dis-
crimination against employment in National Defense. Negroes can
kill the deadly serpent of race hatred in the Army, Navy, Air and
Marine Corps, and smash through and blast the Government, busi-
ness and labor-union red tape to win the right to equal opportunity
in vocational training and re-training in defense employment.
Most important and vital to all, Negroes, by the mobilization
and coordination of their mass power, can cause PRESIDENT ROO-
SEVELT TO ISSUE AN EXECUTIVE ORDER ABOLISHING DISCRIMI-
NATIONS IN ALL GOVERNMENT DEPARTMENTS, ARMY, NAVY, AIR
CORPS AND NATIONAL DEFENSE JOBS.
Of course, the task is not easy. In very truth, it is big, tremen-
dous and difficult.
It will cost money.
It will require sacrifice.
It will tax the Negroes’ courage, determination and will to strug-
gle. But we can, must and will triumph.
The Negroes’ stake in national defense is big. It consists of jobs,
thousands of jobs. It may represent millions, yes, hundreds of mil-
lions of dollars in wages. It consists of new industrial opportuni-
ties and hope. This is worth fighting for.
But to win our stakes, it will require an “all-out,” bold and to-
tal effort and demonstration of colossal proportions.
Negroes can build a mammoth machine of mass action with a
terrific and tremendous driving and striking power that can shat-
ter and crush the evil fortress of race prejudice and hate, if they
will only resolve to do so and never stop, until victory comes.
Dear fellow Negro Americans, be not dismayed in these terri-
ble times. You possess power, great power. Our problem is to har-
ness and hitch it up for action on the broadest, daring and most
gigantic scale.
Aggressive Mass Action

In this period of power politics, nothing counts but pressure,
more pressure, and still more pressure, through the tactic and
strategy of broad, organized, aggressive mass action behind the vi-
tal and important issues of the Negro. To this end, we propose
that ten thousand Negroes MARCH ON WASHINGTON FOR JOBS
IN NATIONAL DEFENSE AND EQUAL INTEGRATION IN THE FIGHT-
ING FORCES OF THE UNITED STATES.
An “all-out” thundering march on Washington, ending in a
monster and huge demonstration at Lincoln’s Monument will
shake up white America.
It will shake up official Washington.
It will give encouragement to our white friends to fight all the
harder by our side, with us, for our righteous cause.
It will gain respect for the Negro people.
It will create a new sense of self-respect among Negroes.
But what of national unity?
We believe in national unity which recognizes equal opportu-
nity of black and white citizens to jobs in national defense and the
armed forces, and in all other institutions and endeavors in Amer-
ica. We condemn all dictatorships, Fascist, Nazi and Communist.
We are loyal, patriotic Americans, all.
But, if American democracy will not defend its defenders; if
American democracy will not protect its protectors; if American
democracy will not give jobs to its toilers because of race or color;
if American democracy will not insure equality of opportunity,
freedom and justice to its citizens, black and white, it is a hollow
mockery and belies the principles for which it is supposed to stand.
To the hard, difficult and trying problem of securing equal par-
ticipation in national defense, we summon all Negro Americans
to march on Washington. We summon Negro Americans to form

committees in various cities to recruit and register marchers and
raise funds through the sale of buttons and other legitimate means
for the expenses of marchers to Washington by buses, train, pri-
vate automobiles, trucks, and on foot.
We summon Negro Americans to stage marches on their City
Halls and Councils in their respective cities and urge them to
memorialize the President to issue an executive order to abolish
discrimination in the Government and national defense.
However, we sternly counsel against violence and ill-considered
and intemperate action and the abuse of power. Mass power, like
physical power, when misdirected is more harmful than helpful.
We summon you to mass action that is orderly and lawful, but
aggressive and militant, for justice, equality and freedom.
Crispus Attucks marched and died as a martyr for American in-
dependence. Nat Turner, Denmark Vesey, Gabriel Prosser, Har-
riet Tubman and Frederick Douglass fought, bled and died for the
emancipation of Negro slaves and the preservation of American
democracy.
Abraham Lincoln, in times of the grave emergency of the Civil
War, issued the Proclamation of Emancipation for the freedom
of Negro slaves and the preservation of American democracy.
Freedom from Stigma

Today, we call upon President Roosevelt, a great humanitarian
and idealist, to follow in the footsteps of his noble and illustrious
predecessor and take the second decisive step in this world and
national emergency and free American Negro citizens of the
stigma, humiliation and insult of discrimination and Jim-
Crowism in Government departments and national defense.
The Federal Government cannot with clear conscience call upon
private industry and labor unions to abolish discrimination based
upon race and color as long as it practices discrimination itself
against Negro Americans.
Viewpoint 6
“The attack on discrimination by use of legal
machinery has only scratched the surface.”
Civil Rights Can Be

Secured Through
Legal Action
Thurgood Marshall
As lead attorney for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund during the
pivotal years of the black freedom struggle, Thurgood Marshall
remains one of the most well-known figures of the civil rights
movement. Marshall’s use of legal strategies to eradicate segre-
gation culminated in many precedent-setting cases. In his
twenty-three years with the NAACP, Marshall won twenty-nine
of the thirty-two cases he argued before the Supreme Court. His
most famous case, Brown v. Board of Education, declared segre-
gation of public schools illegal. Marshall went on to become the
first black justice to sit on the Supreme Court of the United
States.
In the following address before a special wartime conference
of the NAACP in 1944, Marshall outlines the legal machinery
behind the NAACP’s campaign to overturn racial segregation
and other forms of discrimination. Critical to the success of the
legal campaign, Marshall states, is the enforcement of existing
civil rights statutes and the creation of new legislation.
Thurgood Marshall, address to the NAACP Wartime Conference, July 13, 1944.
61
T he struggle for full citizenship rights can be speeded by en-

forcement of existing statutory provisions protecting our civil
rights. The attack on discrimination by use of legal machinery has
only scratched the surface. An understanding of the existing
statutes protecting our civil rights is necessary if we are to work
toward enforcement of these statutes.
Defining Civil Rights

The titles “civil rights” and “civil liberties” have grown to include
large numbers of subjects, some of which are properly included
under these titles and others which should not be included. One
legal treatise has defined the subject of civil rights as follows: “In
its broadest sense, the term civil rights includes those rights which
are the outgrowth of civilization, the existence and exercise of
which necessarily follow from the rights that repose in the sub-
jects of a country exercising self-government.”
The Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution
are prohibitions against action by the states and state officers vio-
lating civil rights. In addition to these provisions of the United
States Constitution and a few others, there are several statutes of
the United States which also attempt to protect the rights of indi-
vidual citizens against private persons as well as public officers.
Whether these provisions are included under the title of “civil
rights” or “civil liberties” or any other subject is more or less unim-
portant as long as we bear in mind the provisions themselves.
All of the statutes, both federal and state, which protect the in-
dividual rights of Americans are important to Negroes as well as
other citizens. Many of these provisions, however, are of peculiar
significance to Negroes because of the fact that in many instances
these statutes are the only protection to which Negroes can look
for redress. It should also be pointed out that many officials of both
state and federal governments are reluctant to protect the rights of
Negroes. It is often difficult to enforce our rights when they are
perfectly clear. It is practically impossible to secure enforcement of
any of our rights if there is any doubt whatsoever as to whether or
not a particular statute applies to the particular state of facts.
As to law enforcement itself, the rule as to most American citi-
zens is that if there is any way possible to prosecute individuals
who have willfully interfered with the rights of other individuals

such prosecution is attempted. However, when the complaining
party is a Negro, the rule is usually to look for any possible
grounds for not prosecuting. It is therefore imperative that Ne-
groes be thoroughly familiar with the rights guaranteed them by
law in order that they may be in a position to insist that all of their
fundamental rights as American citizens be protected.
The Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, abolishing
slavery, the Fourteenth Amendment, prohibiting any action of
state officials denying due process or the equal protection of its
laws, and the Fifteenth Amendment, prohibiting discrimination
by the states in voting are well-known to all of us. In addition to
these provisions of the Constitution, there are the so-called Fed-
eral “Civil Rights Statutes” which include several Acts of Congress
such as the Civil Rights Act and other statutes which have been
amended from time to time and are now grouped together in sev-
eral sections of the United States Code. The original Civil Rights
Act was passed in Congress in 1866, but was vetoed by President
Andrew Johnson the same year. It was, however, passed over the
veto. It was reintroduced and passed in 1870 because there was
some doubt as to its constitutionality, having been passed before
the Fourteenth Amendment was ratified. The second bill has been
construed several times and has been held constitutional by the
United States Supreme Court, which in one case stated that “the
plain objects of these statutes, as of the Constitution which au-
thorized them, was to place the colored race, in respect to civil
rights, upon a level with the whites. They made the rights and re-
sponsibilities, civil and criminal, of the two races exactly the
same.” (Virginia v. Rives, 100 U.S. 313 [1879])
The Thirteenth and Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments,
along with the civil rights statutes, protect the following rights:
1. Slavery is abolished and peonage is punishable as a federal
crime. (13th amendment)
2. All persons born or naturalized in the U.S. are citizens and
no state shall make or enforce any law abridging their privileges
or immunities, or deny them equal protection of the law. (14th
amendment)
3. The right of citizens to vote cannot be abridged by the United
States or by any state on account of race or color. (15th amend-

ment)
4. All persons within the jurisdiction of the United States shall
have the same right to enforce contracts, or sue, be parties, give
evidence, and to the full and equal benefit of all laws and pro-
ceedings as is enjoyed by white citizens.
5. All persons shall be subject to like punishment, pains, penal-
ties, taxes, licenses, and extractions of every kind, and to no other.
6. All citizens shall have the same right in every state and terri-
tory, as is enjoyed by white citizens to inherit, purchase, lease, sell,
hold and convey property.
7. Every person who, under color of statutes, custom or usage,
subjects any citizen of the United States or person within the ju-
risdiction thereof to the deprivation of any rights, privileges, or
immunities secured by the Constitution and laws is liable in an ac-
tion at law, suit in equity, or other proper proceedings for redress.
8. Citizens possessing all other qualifications may not be dis-
qualified from jury service in federal or state courts on account of
race or color; any officer charged with the duty of selection or
summoning of jurors who shall exclude citizens for reasons of race
or color shall be guilty of a misdemeanor.
9. A conspiracy of two or more persons to deprive any person
or class of persons of any rights guaranteed by constitution and
laws is punishable as a crime and the conspirators are also liable
in damages.
Most of these provisions only protect the citizen against wrong-
doing by public officials, although the peonage statutes and one
or two others protect against wrongs by private persons.
Despite the purposes of these Acts which the United States
Supreme Court insisted in 1879 “made the rights and responsi-
bilities, civil and criminal, of the two races exactly the same,” the
experience of all of us points to the fact that this purpose has not
as yet been accomplished. There are several reasons for this. In the
first place, in certain sections of this country, especially in the deep
south, judges, prosecutors and members of grand and petit juries,
have simply refused to follow the letter or spirit of these provi-
sions. Very often it happens that although the judge and prose-
cutor are anxious to enforce the laws, members of the jury are re-
luctant to protect the rights of Negroes. A third reason is that

many Negroes themselves for one reason or another hesitate to
avail themselves of the protection afforded by the United States
Constitution and statutes.
These statutes protecting our civil rights in several instances
provide for both criminal and civil redress. Some are criminal only
and others are for civil action only. Criminal prosecution for vi-
olation of the federal statutes can be obtained only through the
United States Department of Justice.
Up through and including the administration of Attorney Gen-
eral Homer S. Cummings, Negroes were unable to persuade the
U.S. Department of Justice to enforce any of the civil rights
statutes where Negroes were the complaining parties. The NAACP
and its staff made repeated requests and in many instances filed
detailed statements and briefs requesting prosecution for lynch
mobs, persons guilty of peonage and other apparent violations of
the federal statutes. It was not until the [1939–1940] administra-
tion of Attorney General Frank Murphy that any substantial ef-
forts were made to enforce the civil rights statutes as they apply to
Negroes. Attorney General Murphy established a Civil Rights Sec-
tion in the Department of Justice.
During the present [1944] administration of Attorney General
Francis Biddle there have been several instances of prosecution of
members of lynch mobs for the first time in the history of the
United States Department of Justice. There have also been nu-
merous successful prosecutions of Persons guilty of peonage and
slavery. However, other cases involving the question of the beat-
ing and killing of Negro soldiers by local police officers, the case
involving the action of Sheriff Tip Hunter, of Brownsville, Ten-
nessee, who killed at least one Negro citizen and forced several
others to leave town, the several cases of refusal to permit quali-
fied Negroes to vote, as well as other cases, have received the at-
tention of the Department of Justice only to the extent of “inves-
tigating.” Our civil rights as guaranteed by the federal statutes will
never become a reality until the U.S. Department of Justice de-
cides that it represents the entire United States and is not required
to fear offending any section of the country which believes that it
has the God-given right to be above the laws of the United States
and the United States Supreme Court. . . .

There are, however, certain bright spots in the enforcement of
the federal statutes. In addition to the lynching and peonage cases
handled by the Washington office of the Department of Justice,
there have been a few instances of courageous United States At-
torneys in such places as Georgia who have vigorously prosecuted
police officers who have used the power of their office as a cloak
for beating up Negro citizens.
An Example of Civil Rights Enforcement

As a result of the recent decision in the Texas Primary Case [Smith
v. Allwright], it is possible to use an example of criminal prosecu-
tion under the civil rights statutes by taking a typical case of the
refusal to permit the Negroes to vote in the Democratic Primary
election. Let us see how a prosecution is started: In Waycross,
Georgia, for example, we will suppose a Negro elector on July 4,
1944, went to the polls with his tax receipt and demanded to vote
in the Democratic Primary. He should, of course, have witnesses
with him. Let us also assume that the election officials refused to
let him vote solely because of his race or color.
As a matter of law, the election officials violated a federal crim-
inal law and are subject to fine and imprisonment. But how
should the voter or the organized Negro citizens, or the local
NAACP Branch go about trying to get the machinery of criminal
justice in motion? Of course, the details of what happens must be
put in writing and sworn to by the person who tried to vote and
also by his witnesses. Then the matter must be placed before the
United States Attorney. This is the federal district attorney.
I wonder how many of the delegates here know who is the
United States Attorney for their district, or even where his office
is. Every Branch should know the United States Attorney for that
area, even if a delegation goes in just to get acquainted and let him
know that we expect him to enforce the civil rights laws with the
same vigor as used in enforcing other criminal statutes.
But back to the voting case. The affidavits must be presented to
the United States Attorney with a demand that he investigate and
place the evidence before the Federal Grand Jury. At the same time
copies of the affidavits and statements in the case should be sent to
the National Office. We will see that they get to the Attorney Gen-
eral in Washington. I wish that I could guarantee you that the At-
torney General would put pressure on local United States Attor-
neys who seem reluctant to prosecute. At least we can assure you
that we will give the Attorney General no rest unless he gets behind
these reluctant United States attorneys throughout the south.
There is no reason why a hundred clear cases of this sort should
not be placed before the United States Attorneys and the Attor-
ney General every year until the election officials discover that it
is both wiser and safer to follow the United States laws than to vi-
olate them. It is up to us to see that these officials of the Depart-
ment of Justice are called upon to act again and again wherever
there are violations of the civil rights statutes. Unfortunately, there
are plenty of such cases. It is equally unfortunate that there are not
enough individuals and groups presenting these cases and de-
manding action.
Neglected Civil Rights Statutes

The responsibility for enforcement of the civil provisions of the
civil rights statutes rests solely with the individual. In the past we
have neglected to make full use of these statutes. Although they
have been on the books since 1870, there were very few cases un-
der these statutes until recent years. Whereas in the field of general
law there are many, many precedents for all other types of action,
there are very few precedents for the protection of civil liberties.
The most important of the civil rights provisions is the one
which provides that “every person who, under color of any statute,
ordinance, regulation, custom or usage of any state or territory,
subjects or causes to be subjected any citizen of the United States
or person within the jurisdiction thereof to the deprivation of any
rights, privileges or immunities secured by the Constitution and
laws shall be liable to the party injured in an action at law, suit in
equity or other proper proceeding for redress.” Under this statute
any officer of a state, county or municipality who while acting in
an official capacity, denies to any citizen or person within the state
any of the rights guaranteed by the Constitution or laws is subject
to a civil action. This statute has been used to equalize teachers’
salaries and to obtain bus transportation for Negro schoolchil-
dren. It can be used to attack every form of discrimination against

Negroes by public school systems. . . .
This statute, along with other of the civil rights statutes, can be
used to enforce the right to register and vote throughout the coun-
try. The threats of many of the bigots in the south to disregard the
ruling of the Supreme Court of the United States in the recent
Texas Primary decision has not intimidated a single person. The
United States Supreme Court remains the highest court in this
land. Election officials in states affected by this decision will either
let Negroes vote in the Democratic Primaries, or they will be sub-
jected to both criminal and civil prosecution under the civil rights
statutes. In every state in the deep south Negroes have this year at-
tempted to vote in the primary elections. Affidavits concerning
the refusal to permit them to vote in Alabama, Florida and Geor-
gia have already been sent to the United States Department of Jus-
tice. We will insist that these election officials be prosecuted and
will also file civil suits against the guilty officials.
It can be seen from these examples that we have just begun to
scratch the surface in the fight for full enforcement of these statutes.
The NAACP can move no faster than the individuals who have
been discriminated against. We only take up cases where we are re-
quested to do so by persons who have been discriminated against.
Another crucial problem is the ever-present problem of segre-
gation. Whereas the principle has been established by cases han-
dled by the NAACP that neither states nor municipalities can pass
ordinances segregating residences by race, the growing problem
today is the problem of segregation by means of restrictive
covenants, whereby private owners band together to prevent Ne-
gro occupancy of particular neighborhoods. Although this prob-
lem is particularly acute in Chicago, it is at the same time grow-
ing in intensity throughout the country. It has the full support of
the real estate boards in the several cities, as well as most of the
banks and other leading agencies. The legal attack on this prob-
lem has met with spotty success. In several instances restrictive
covenants have been declared invalid because the neighborhood
has changed, or for other reasons. Other cases have been lost.
However, the NAACP is in the process of preparing a detailed
memorandum and will establish procedure which will lead to an
all-out legal attack on restrictive covenants. Whether or not this

attack will be successful cannot be determined at this time. [Edi-
tor’s note: In 1948 the Supreme Court in Shelley v. Kraemer ruled
that racially restrictive covenants could not be legally enforced un-
der the Constitution.]
The National Housing Agency and the Federal Public Housing
Authority have established a policy of segregation in federal pub-
lic housing projects. A test case has been filed in Detroit, Mich.,
and is still pending in the local federal courts. The Detroit situa-
tion is the same as in other sections of the country. Despite the fact
that the Housing Authority and other agencies insist that they will
maintain separate but equal facilities, it never develops that the sep-
arate facilities are equal in all respects. In Detroit separate projects
were built and it developed that by the first of this year every single
white family in the area eligible for public housing had been ac-
commodated and there were still some 800 “white” units vacant
with “no takers.” At the same time there were some 45,000 Negroes
inadequately housed and with no units open to them. This is the
inevitable result of “separate but equal” treatment. . . .
State Laws
We should also be mindful of the several so-called civil rights
statutes in the several states. There are civil rights acts in at least
18 states, all of which are in the north and middle west. These
statutes are in California, Colorado, Connecticut, Illinois, Indi-
ana, Iowa, Kansas, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Ne-
braska, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island
and Washington. California provides only for civil action. Illinois,
Kansas, Minnesota, New York and Ohio have both civil and crim-
inal provisions. In New Jersey the only action is a criminal action,
or an action for penalty in the name of the state, the amount of
the penalty going to the state.
In those states not having civil rights statutes it is necessary that
every effort be made to secure passage of one. In states having
weak civil rights statutes efforts should be made to have them
strengthened. In states with reasonably strong civil rights statutes,
like Illinois and New York, it is necessary that every effort be made
to enforce them. . . .
Outside of New York City there are very few successful cases
against the civil rights statutes because of the fact that members
of the jury are usually reluctant to enforce the statutes. I under-
stand the same is true for Illinois. The only method of counter-
acting this vicious practice is by means of educating the general
public, from which juries are chosen, to the plight of the Negro.
It should also be pointed out that many of our friends of other
races are not as loud and vociferous as the enemies of our race. In
northern and mid-western cities it repeatedly happens that a prej-
udiced southerner on entering a hotel or restaurant, seeing Ne-
groes present makes an immediate and loud protest to the man-
ager. It is very seldom that any of our friends go to the managers
of places where Negroes are excluded and complain to them of
this fact. Quite a job can be done if our friends of other races will
only realize the importance of this problem and get up from their
comfortable chairs and actually go to work on the problem.
Bring Civil Rights Violators to Justice

Thus it seems clear that although it is necessary and vital to all of
us that we continue our program for additional legislation to
guarantee and enforce certain of our rights, at the same time we
must continue with ever-increasing vigor to enforce those few
statutes, both federal and state, which are now on the statute
books. We must not be delayed by people who say “the time is not
ripe,” nor should we proceed with caution for fear of destroying
the “status quo.” Persons who deny to us our civil rights should
be brought to justice now. Many people believe the time is always
“ripe” to discriminate against Negroes. All right then—the time
is always “ripe” to bring them to justice. The responsibility for the
enforcement of these statutes rests with every American citizen
regardless of race or color. However, the real job has to be done
by the Negro population with whatever friends of the other races
are willing to join in.
W E
S
IN WORLD HISTORY
CHAPTER 2
Segregation or
Integration?
S
E
Chapter Preface
A lthough the civil rights movement sought to dismantle all

forms of racial injustice, one of its most pointed goals was the
elimination of segregation, the attempt by many white southern-
ers to separate the races in virtually every sphere of life. Segrega-
tion gained a legal foothold in the historic case Plessy v. Ferguson,
which revolved around Homer Plessy, a black shoemaker in
Louisiana, who was arrested in 1892 after he boarded a train and
took a seat in the whites-only section. In the case that followed,
the court ruled that Louisiana had a right to prevent racial mix-
ing. Separating passengers, according to the decision, did not vi-
olate the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment
as long as the accommodations for blacks and whites were “sub-
stantially equal.” The effects of the ruling were profound. Plessy v.
Ferguson and its “separate but equal” doctrine spawned the Jim
Crow laws, a new wave of segregation laws named after a buf-
foonish black minstrel show character. In the age of Jim Crow,
many southern states segregated their restaurants, buses, parks,
lavatories, movie theaters, and other public places. Moreover, the
separate facilities for blacks and whites were rarely, if ever, equal.
To many, the best chance for eradicating Jim Crow lay in dis-
mantling the legal foundations that upheld the “separate but
equal” doctrine. By the 1940s civil rights workers had already
made progress in outlawing discrimination in the defense indus-
tries and the armed forces. At the same time, lawyers for the Na-
tional Association for the Advancement of Colored People had
presented a series of cases before the Supreme Court arguing that
segregation meant inherently unequal facilities. These cases cul-
minated in the Court’s 1954 landmark decision Brown v. Board of
Education, which declared that separate educational facilities were
inherently unequal and therefore unconstitutional.
The historic Brown ruling seemed to demonstrate that the Court
could undermine southern segregation practices. Yet resistance to
Brown was fierce, especially in the Deep South, where the most ar-
dent segregationists refused to comply on the grounds that the
72
SEGREGATION OR INTEGRATION ? 73
Court had illegitimately usurped local authority, which rendered

the federal ruling invalid. To circumvent desegregation, southern
leaders and residents launched a concerted effort that included le-
gal appeals and the formation of White Citizens’ Councils, white
supremacist groups that used a variety of measures to resist inte-
gration and maintain the southern way of life. Some even debated
whether blacks desired integration at all.
Opposition to the mandates set forth in Brown ultimately ush-
ered in an era of black activism as African Americans and their
white allies sought not only to implement Brown but also to ex-
tend its principles to all areas of public life. The movement that
was born in the drive to desegregate—the boycotts, sit-ins, and
demonstrations of the 1950s and 1960s—became known as the
civil rights movement.
Viewpoint 1
“Racial segregation in our country is immoral,
costly, and damaging to the nation’s prestige.”
Segregation Is
Morally Wrong
Thurgood Marshall
Throughout his legal career, Thurgood Marshall used the courts
to expose Jim Crow practices and dismantle the legal founda-
tions of segregation. In the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education,
his most famous case and perhaps one of the most important
cases in American history, Marshall pleaded the legal case
against segregation in the public schools. On the eve of his deci-
sive victory in the case, Marshall delivered a lecture at Dillard
University in New Orleans. In the following speech, which orig-
inally appeared in the Edwin R. Embree Memorial Lectures, Mar-
shall explains why America’s discriminatory racial practices vio-
late the Judeo-Christian ethic and the democratic creed upon
which the nation is built, deeming segregation “just as unscien-
tifically supported, immoral, and un-American as slavery.”
T here has been much discussion during recent years concerning

the question of the removal in this country of dual citizenship
based solely on race and color. The primary emphasis has been on
the elimination of racial segregation. No one denies that progress is
Thurgood Marshall, The Edwin R. Embree Memorial Lectures. New Orleans:

Dillard University.
74
being made. There are, however, some who say that the progress is
too slow and others who say that the progress is too rapid. The im-
portant thing to remember is that progress is being made. We are
moving ahead. We have passed the crossroads. We are moving to-
ward a completely integrated society, North and South.
Those who doubt this and those who are afraid of complete in-
tegration are victims of a background based upon long indoctri-
nation of only one side of the controversy in this country. They
know only of one side of the controversy in this country. They
know only of one side of slavery. They know only the biased re-
ports about Reconstruction and the long-standing theory which
seems to support the “legality” of the separate-but-equal doctrine.
In order to adequately appraise the situation, we must first un-
derstand the problem in relation to our history—legal and polit-
ical. Secondly, we must give proper weight to progress that has
been made with and without legal pressure, and thirdly, we must
look to the future.
Our government is based on the principle of the equality of man
the individual, not the group. All of us can quote the principle that
“All men are created equal.” Our basic legal document, the Con-
stitution of the United States, guarantees equal protection of the
laws to all of us. Many state constitutions have similar provisions.
We even have a “Bill of Rights” in the Constitution of Louisiana.
These high-sounding principles we preach and teach. However,
in the eyes of the world we stand convicted of violating these prin-
ciples day in and day out.
Today, one hundred and seventy-seven years after the signing
of the Declaration of Independence and eighty-six years after the
Fourteenth Amendment was adopted, we have a society where, in
varying degrees throughout the country, but especially in the
South, Negroes, solely because they are Negroes, are segregated,
ostracized and set apart from all other Americans. This discrimi-
nation extends from the cradle to the graveyard. (And I empha-
size graveyard, rather than grave.) Or, to put it even more bluntly,
in many areas of this country, a white paroled murderer would be
welcome in places which would at the same time exclude such
people as Ralph Bunche, Marian Anderson, Jackie Robinson, and
many others. Constitutionally protected individual rights have
been effectively destroyed by outmoded theories of racial or group

inferiority. Why is this true? How long can we afford the luxury
of segregation and discrimination?
Historical Background
One reason this condition of dual citizenship exists is because we
have been conditioned to an acceptance of this theory as a fact.
We are the products of a misunderstanding of history. As a mat-
ter of fact, only in recent years have accurate studies of the pre-
Civil War period and the Reconstruction period of our history
been published.
Our position today is tied up with our past history—at least as
far back as the 1820’s. At that time the antislavery movement was
beginning to take permanent form. It should be borne in mind
that those people in New England, Ohio and other areas, who
started this movement became dedicated to a principle which has
become known as the Judaeo-Christian ethic. This principle was
carried forth in their determination to remove slavery from our
society, and to remove the badges of caste and inferiority whereby
an American could be ostracized or set apart from fellow Ameri-
cans solely because of race. Of course, slavery per se was the im-
mediate objective—the abolition of slavery—but the ultimate goal
was the same as the unfinished business we have before us today,
namely, to remove race and caste from the American life.
These people in the 1820 period—1820 to 1865—sought to
translate their moral theories and principles into law. They started
by pamphleteering and speechmaking. They recognized that equal
protection of the laws must always be, in part, an ethical and
moral concept, rather than a law. They sought to constitutional-
ize this moral argument or ideal. Slavery—with its theories of
racial damnation, racial inferiority and racial discrimination—
was inherently repugnant to the American creed and Christian
ethics. They sought to support their moral theories by use of the
Declaration of Independence and certain sections of the Consti-
tution as it existed at that time. In so far as public meetings were
concerned, speakers were barred from such meetings in the
South—brutally beaten or killed, and many were run out of sim-
ilar meetings in Northern cities and towns. It was, therefore, im-
possible to get behind the original iron curtain to get public sup-
port for much of the program.
In their legal attack they were thwarted by the decision of the
United States Supreme Court in the Dred Scott case, which held
that no person of African descent, slave or free, had any rights that
a white man was bound to respect. The important thing to re-
member throughout this period is that the opponents of slavery
were seeking a Constitutional basis—a legal platform—for the
democratic principle of the equality of man.
After the Emancipation Proclamation was signed, many states
passed Black Codes and other infamous statutes, effectively re-
turning the emancipated slaves to their inferior status. Conse-
quently, the same people who fought to abolish slavery had to take
the lead in Congress in writing the thirteenth, fourteenth and fif-
teenth amendments.
This short period of intense legislation was followed by the Re-
construction period. Much of that which we have read concern-
ing this period has emphasized, overstated and exaggerated the
errors of judgment made in trying to work out the “Negro prob-
lem” in such fashion as to give real meaning to these Civil War
amendments [but these amendments] were actually thwarted by
the conspiracy between Northern capitalists and others to bring
“harmony” by leaving the Negro and his problem to the tender
mercies of the South. This brought about the separate-but-equal
pattern, which spread not only throughout the South but ex-
tended and now exists in many Northern and Western areas.
The Equality of Man

Despite the distortion of this historical background, which has be-
come firmly embedded in our minds, is the “understanding” that
racial segregation is legal and valid even if in violation of our
moral principles. The fallacy of this reasoning is that the equal
protection of the laws was intended to be the constitutionaliza-
tion of the ethic and moral principle of the absolute equality of
man—the right of an individual neither to be circumscribed or
conditioned by group, race or color.
It should, therefore, be remembered that our society is the vic-
tim of the following periods of history: the period of slavery, when
the slaveholders defended slavery by repeating over and over again

the myth that slavery was not only a positive good for the nation
but was absolutely beneficial and necessary for the Negroes them-
selves. Consequently, even free Negroes were denied the right of
citizenship and subjected to all manner of abuse without legal re-
dress. Immediately following the Civil War, and indeed up to the
1930’s, is the period when Negroes were no longer slaves but were
certainly not yet full citizens. Having passed through this laissez-
faire period in so far as asserting our Constitutional rights is con-
cerned, Negroes began in the thirties the all-out fight to secure the
right to vote and at the same time to break down discrimination
and segregation.
In so far as securing the right to vote, beginning with the regis-
tration cases and the white-primary cases and others, much
progress has been made to the end that as of the 1948 national
elections, at least 1,300,000 Negroes voted in the deep South. We
have seen Negroes elected to the city council in Richmond, Vir-
ginia, Nashville, Tennessee, and many cities in North Carolina.
We have seen Negroes elected to the governing board of the Dem-
ocratic party in Atlanta, Georgia. We have also seen Negroes
elected to school boards in cities such as Atlanta, Georgia, Lynch-
burg, Virginia, and Winston-Salem, North Carolina. There are
still, however, several small areas in Alabama, Mississippi, and at
least four parishes in Louisiana where Negroes are still prevented
from registering as qualified voters. (But these are distinctly local
problems, which are being attended to and can be pushed aside
on that basis.)
In the North we have seen the drive for protection of the right to
work without regard to race and color—the drive for F.E.P.C. [Fair
Employment Practices Committee] legislation. We have seen such
legislation passed in at least eight states in the North, leaving forty
states and the District of Columbia to go, before we have the nec-
essary safeguards to protect man’s right not to be deprived of an op-
portunity to earn a livelihood because of race, religion or ancestry.
We have also seen the breaking-down of the legal barriers to
owning and occupying real property without regard to race or
color. Today, as a result of several Supreme Court decisions, any
American any place in the United States, regardless of race or
color, may own and occupy property wherever he can find a will-
ing seller, has the money to purchase the property and courage to
live on it. We still, however, have residential segregation through-
out the country, not by law, not by the courts, but by a combina-
tion of circumstances, such as, the reactionary policies of mort-
gage companies and real-estate boards, public-housing agencies,
including F.H.A., and other governmental agencies. We also find
an unwillingness on the part of many Negroes to exercise their
rights in this field. In recent years instead of progress toward an
integrated community, we find that the Negro ghetto is merely
expanding into a larger and more glorified and gilded ghetto. This
unwillingness to exercise our own rights is due in part to the long
indoctrination that we are different from or inferior to others and
therefore should voluntarily segregate ourselves.
America’s Racial Practices

As of the present time, the paramount issue in so far as Ameri-
canism is concerned is the ending of all racial distinctions in
American life. The reasons for this are many. A weighty factor, of
course, is the recognition by more and more people in high places
that the world situation in regard to the sensitive areas through-
out the world depends on how well we can handle our race prob-
lem in this country. Our country can no longer tolerate an Achilles
heel of discriminatory practices toward its darker citizens. Even
more important is the realization that the equality of man as a
principle and the equal protection of the laws as a Constitutional
concept are both based upon the moral principle of individual re-
sponsibility rather than racial identity.
Racial segregation in our country is immoral, costly, and dam-
aging to the nation’s prestige. Segregation and discrimination vi-
olate the Judaeo-Christian ethic, and the democratic creed on
which our national morality is based is soundly established in the
minds of most men. But in addition, it has been shown that the
costs of segregation and discrimination to the nation are stagger-
ing. Elmo Roper, social scientist and pollster of American public
opinion, has stated, “The resultant total of the cost of discrimi-
nation comes to roughly $10 out of every $75 paycheck, or, in to-
tal, $30 billion lost every year.” This figure alone would amount
Three African American women protest segregation. Before the civil rights
movement, Jim Crow laws prohibited the integration of public schools.
to a cost of $2,000 per year to every individual in America. But

perhaps even more damaging to the nation is the current effect of
America’s racial practices on America’s role in international af-
fairs and world leadership. According to a recent statement by our
State Department experts, nearly half of the recent Russian pro-
paganda about America has been concentrated on race, linking
Communist germ-warfare charges with alleged racial brutality in
this country. In addition, Americans returning from abroad con-
sistently report having been questioned over and over about racial
problems in this country.
This concern about American racial practices seems especially
strong among the two thirds of the world that is darker-skinned.
Our former ambassador to India, Chester Bowles, wrote the fol-
lowing statement, after attending an Indian press conference: “As
I later discovered is almost invariably the case in any Asian press
conference or forum, the Number One question was, ‘What about

America’s treatment of the Negro?’”
Shortly after returning from a tour of Asian and Pacific areas,
Vice-President Nixon made this statement:
Americans must create a better understanding of American
ideals abroad by practicing and thinking tolerance and respect
for human rights every day of the year. Every act of racial dis-
crimination or prejudice in the United States hurts Ameri-
cans as much as an espionage agent who turns over a weapon
to a foreign enemy.
Historically, we have to ask whether or not, even as we stand to-
day, our country can afford to continue in practicing not what they
preach. Historically, the segregation patterns in the United States
are carry-overs from the principles of slavery. They are based on
the exploded theory of the inferiority of the minority group. Seg-
regation is recognized as resulting from the decision of the major-
ity group without even consulting, less known in seeking, the con-
sent of the segregated group. All of us know that segregation
traditionally results in unequal facilities for the segregated group.
Duplication of facilities is expensive, diverts funds from the econ-
omy which could be utilized to improve facilities for all groups. Fi-
nally, segregation leads to the blockage of real communication be-
tween the two groups. In turn, this blockage increases mutual
suspicion, distrust, hostility, stereotypes and prejudice; and these,
all together, result in a social climate of tension favorable to ag-
gressive behavior and social disorganization which sometimes cul-
minate in race riots. Even where we do not have race riots, the
seeds of tension are ever present in a segregated system.
Psychological Damage
The harm done to the individual begins with the child’s earliest
years, when he becomes aware of status differences among groups
in society and begins to react to patterns of segregation. Prejudice
and discrimination are potentially damaging to the personalities
of all children. The children of the majority group are affected dif-
ferently from those of the minority group. This potential psycho-
logical damage is crystallized by segregation practices sanctioned
by public law—and it is the same whether in the North, the East,

the West, or the South. Damage to the immediate community is
inevitable. This is followed by damage to the state, our federal gov-
ernment and, finally, the world today. The only answer is the com-
plete removal of all racial distinctions that lay at the basis of all this.
And now for the future. Everyone in and out of government
must understand that the future of our government and indeed
the world depends on the recognition of the equality of man—the
principle which is inherent in the theory of our government and
protected by our Constitution.
Of course, we have made progress, but instead of gloating over
this progress, we should get renewed courage to tackle the next
job. Let us not listen to the rantings of politicians like Governors
[James] Byrnes and Talmadge. Governor Byrnes has declared:
Should the Supreme Court decide this case against our posi-
tion, we will face a serious problem. Of only one thing can we
be certain. South Carolina will not now, nor for some years to
come, mix white and colored children in our schools . . . If the
Court changes what is now the law of the land, we will, if it is
possible, live within the law, preserve the public-school system,
and at the same time maintain segregation. If that is not possi-
ble, reluctantly we will abandon the public-school system.
That statement is made by a governor who was formerly a

member of the Supreme Court which he is now talking about.
Governor Herman Talmadge announces that if the decision
comes down opposed to what he thinks it should be, that he, Gov-
ernor Talmadge, will get together as much of his militia as he can
find and challenge the whole United States Army.
Instead of listening to people like this, why not listen to people
who speak for the South like Ralph McGill of the Atlanta Consti-
tution who writes:
An end to segregation—when it comes—will not, of course,
force people to associate socially. That will remain, as now,
personal choice. But it will bring on change—and this is what
state legislatures in South Carolina, Georgia, Mississippi, Vir-
ginia and Alabama are, or will be, considering. They consider
not how to retain legal segregation—which they see soon end-

ing—but how to effect it without legal compulsion . . . Segre-
gation is on the way out and he who tries to tell the people
otherwise does them great disservice. The problem of the fu-
ture is how to live with the change.
There are still those who will continue to tell us that law is one
thing and ethics another. However, I prefer to follow what one le-
gal historian has stated—“Laws and ethics, some men bluntly tell
us are separate fields. So indeed they are. But spare America the
day when both together do not determine the meaning of equal
protection of the laws.”
We must understand the slavery background of segregation and
we must understand the complete lack of any scientific support
for racial superiority or inferiority. We must understand that
racial segregation is violative of every religious principle, as I said
before. We must never forget what racial segregation did to our
parents and is doing to us, and how it will affect our children. We
must turn from misunderstanding and fear to intelligent plan-
ning, courage and determination.
Individual Reactions
Psychologists acknowledge that to achieve a well-balanced, well-
adjusted personality, all human beings require a sense of personal
dignity and worth, acknowledged not only within themselves but
by the society in which they live—the total society. Not every child
reacts to personality conflict in the same way. Behavior patterns
depend on such interrelated factors as family relations, social and
economic class, general personality patterns and other factors. In
the final analysis, however, each segregated child is forced to ad-
just to conflicts not faced by members of the majority group.
Studies published in the Journal of Social Psychology indicate that
members of the lower economic class may react to racial frustra-
tions by overaggressive behavior, hostility toward the minority
group and/or the majority group, and by antisocial behavior.
These reactions are self-destructive inasmuch as society not only
punishes the offenders but often interprets such behavior as jus-
tification for continuing segregation practices against all members
of the group. These studies further indicate that members of the

middle upper class may react by withdrawal, submissive behavior
or rigid conformity to the expected pattern of segregation. Psy-
chologically, this is equally bad.
Generally, however, children of all classes react by adopting an
over-all defeatist attitude, a lowering of personal ambitions, hy-
persensitivity and anxiety about relations in a larger society, and
a tendency to see hostility or rejection even where it might not ex-
ist. This may result in the development and perpetuation of gen-
erally sensitive, conflicting personalities.
Although the range of individual reaction in terms of behavior
and personality patterns is very wide, there is no question that all
minority children are necessarily affected adversely by enforced seg-
regation—and there is not a single scientific study to the contrary.
While the effects of enforced segregation on majority-group
children are more obscure, they are, nevertheless, real. Children
who are taught prejudice, directly or indirectly, are also taught to
gain and evaluate themselves on a totally unrealistic basis. Per-
ceiving minority-group members as inferior does not permit a
member of the majority group to evaluate himself in terms of ac-
tual ability or achievement but permits and encourages self-
deception—that is, “I am at least better than a Negro.”
A culture which permits and encourages enforced segregation
motivates feelings of guilt and necessitates an adjustment to pro-
tect against recognizing the injustice of racial fears and hatreds.
The contradiction between moral, religious, democratic prin-
ciples of the brotherhood of man, the importance of justice or fair
play and the actuality of the prejudiced, discriminatory practices
of individuals and institutions inevitably results in confusion, con-
flict, moral cynicism and guilt feelings in the majority group. This
conflict, supported by pressure to conform to existing patterns,
may result in disrespect for authority, unwholesomeness of ideals
of all authorities (parents, political leaders) and a determination
to run roughshod over everyone not in the conforming group.
Some persons may attempt to resolve this conflict by intensifying
hostility toward the minority group or to express self-hatred in
aggressive behavior.
Of the large number of social scientists who replied to a ques-
tionnaire concerning the probable effect of enforced segregation

under conditions of equal facilities, ninety percent replied that,
regardless of the equality of the facilities provided, enforced seg-
regation is psychologically harmful to the minority group mem-
bers; eighty percent stated it was their opinion that enforced seg-
regation would have damaging effects also on the majority-group
members.
Enforced segregation appears to have the same general and psy-
chological effect regardless of the quality of facilities available.
(That is to answer any of you who believe that the building of a
new Jim Crow high school will solve the problem.) Enforced-
segregation public schools offer official recognition, sanction and
perpetuation to the assumption of inferiority, a myth which has
already been exploded. . . .
The Myth of Racial Superiority

In conclusion, racial segregation is grounded upon the myth of
inherent racial superiority. This myth has been completely ex-
ploded by all scientific studies. It now stands exposed as a theory
which can only be explained as a vehicle for perpetuating racial
prejudice. History reveals that racial segregation is a badge of slav-
ery, is just as unscientifically supported, immoral and un-
American as slavery. Recent history shows that it can be removed,
and that it can be done effectively when approached intelligently.
There is no longer any justification for segregation. There is no
longer any excuse for if. There is no longer any reason under the
sun why intelligent people should continue to find excuses for not
ending segregation in their own community, in the South as well
as in the North.
Viewpoint 2
“The Negro race, as a race, plainly is not equal to
the white race.”
Segregation Is
Necessary
James Jackson Kilpatrick
With its momentous 1954 ruling against school segregation in
Brown v. Board of Education, the Supreme Court had seemingly
paved the way for civil rights. Indeed, many border states—
Kentucky, Maryland, and Missouri, for example—immediately
followed court orders and opened their doors to black students.
Farther south, however, Jim Crow remained rampant. Many
schools refused to comply, and enforcement of the ruling
proved difficult.
James Jackson Kilpatrick, then editor of a Virginia newspaper,
was one of the more vocal critics of the Brown case—and deseg-
regation in general. In the following selection, excerpted from
his 1962 book The Southern Case for School Integration, Kil-
patrick argues that segregation is necessary and that racial
equality is a fallacy. Recounting his southern upbringing, Kil-
patrick concludes that—despite their dual citizenship—blacks
and whites can and do live in relative harmony.
James Jackson Kilpatrick, “The Evidence,” The Southern Case for School Seg-
regation. New York: Crowell-Collier, 1962.
86
T he South, in general, feels, no sharp sense of sin at its “treat-

ment of the Negro.” The guilt hypothesis is vastly overdrawn.
If wrong has been done (and doubtless wrong has been done), we
reflect that within the human relationship wrong always has been
done, by one people upon another, since tribal cavemen quarreled
with club and stone. And whatever the wrongs may have been, the
white South emphatically refuses to accept all the wrongs as her
own. For the South itself has been wronged—cruelly and mali-
ciously wronged, by men in high places whose hypocrisy is ex-
ceeded only by their ignorance, men whose trade is to damn the
bigotry of the segregated South by day and to sleep in lily-white
Westchester County by night. We are keenly aware, as Perry Mor-
gan remarked in a telling phrase, of a North that wishes to de-
nounce discrimination and have it too.
But let us begin gently. The Southerner who would grope seri-
ously for understanding of his own perplexing region, and the
non-Southerner who would seek in earnest to learn more than his
textbooks would tell him, cannot make a start with Brown v. Board
of Education on a May afternoon in 1954. Neither can he begin
with Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896, or with ratification of the Four-
teenth Amendment in 1868, or with Appomattox three years ear-
lier. A start has to be made much earlier, in 1619, when the first
twenty Negroes arrived from Africa aboard a Dutch slaver and fas-
tened upon the South a wretched incubus that the belated
penances of New Englanders have not expiated at all.
The Dual Society

We of the South have been reared from that day in a strange so-
ciety that only now—and how uncomfortably!—is becoming
known at first hand outside the South. This is the dual society,
made up of white and Negro coexisting in an oddly intimate re-
moteness. It is a way of life that has to be experienced. Children
mask their eyes and play at being blind. Even so, some of my
Northern friends mask their eyes and play at being Southern; they
try to imagine what it must be like to be white in the South, to be
Negro in the South. Novelist John Griffin dyed his skin and spent
three weeks or so pretending to be Negro, looking for incidents
to confirm his prejudices. But a child always knows that he can
take his hands from his eyes, and see, that he is not really blind;
and those who have not grown up from childhood, and fashioned
their whole world from a delicately bounded half a world, cannot
comprehend what this is all about. They wash the dye from their
imaginations, and put aside The New York Times, and awake to a
well-ordered society in which the Negroes of their personal ac-
quaintance are sipping martinis and talking of Middle Eastern
diplomacy. They form an image of “the Negro” (as men form an
image of the French, or the British, or the Japanese) in terms of
the slim and elegant Harvard student, the eloquent spokesman of
a civil rights group, the trim stenographer in a publishing office:
Thurgood Marshall on the bench, Ralph Bunche in the lecture
hall. It is a splendid image, finely engraved on brittle glass, an ob-
ject of universal admiration on the mantle of the New Republic. It
is an image scarcely known in the South.
My father came from New Orleans. His father, a captain in the
Confederate Army, returned from the War and established a pros-
perous business in ship chandlery there. And though I myself was
born in Oklahoma, Father having moved there just prior to World
War I, we children visited along the Delta in our nonage. We sailed
on Pontchartrain, and crabbed at Pass Christian, and once or twice
were taken from school in February to sit spellbound on Canal
Street and watch the Mardi Gras go by. Our life in Oklahoma was
New Orleans once removed; it was a life our playmates accepted
as matter-of-factly as children of a coast accept the tides: The Ne-
groes were; we were. They had their lives; we had ours. There were
certain things one did: A proper white child obeyed the family Ne-
groes, ate with them, bothered them, teased them, loved them,
lived with them, learned from them. And there were certain things
one did not do: One did not intrude upon their lives, or ask about
Negro institutions, or bring a Negro child in the front door. And
at five, or six, or seven, one accepted, without question, that Call-
ine and Cubboo, who were vaguely the charges of a Negro gar-
dener up the street, had their schools; and we had ours.
Subconsciousness of Race
Does all this have the air of a chapter from William Gilmore Simms
or a post-bellum romance by Thomas Nelson Page? I myself lived
it, forty years ago; my own sons have lived it in this generation. My
father lived it, and his father before him. For three hundred years,
the South has lived with this subconsciousness of race. Who hears
a clock tick, or the surf murmur, or the trains pass? Not those who
live by the clock or the sea or the track. In the South, the accep-
tance of racial separation begins in the cradle. What rational man
imagines this concept can be shattered overnight?
We had two Negroes who served my family more than twenty
years. One was Lizzie. The other was Nash. Lizzie was short and
plump and placid, and chocolate-brown; she “lived on,” in a room
and bath over the garage, and her broad face never altered in its
kindness. Nash was short and slim, older, better educated, more
a leader; she was African-black; and as a laundress, she came in af-
ter church on Sundays, put the clothes down to soak in the base-
ment tubs, gossiped with Lizzie, scolded her, raised Lizzie’s sights.
On Monday, the two of them did the wash, hanging the clothes
on heavy wire lines outside the kitchen door, and late in the af-
ternoon Nash ironed. She pushed the iron with an economical
push-push, thump; turn the shirt; push-push, thump. And I
would come home from school to the smell of starch and the faint
scorch of the iron and the push-push, thump, and would descend
to the basement only to be ordered upstairs to wash my hands and
change out of school clothes.
Toward the end of their lives, disaster came to both of them.
Lizzie went slowly blind, through some affliction no surgeon
could correct, and Nash lost the middle three fingers of one hand
when her scarf tangled in the bellows of a church organ. Never-
theless, they stayed with us until age at last put them on the side-
lines. And as far as love and devotion and respect can reach, they
were members of the family. Yet I often have wondered, in later
years, did we children know them? Did Mother and Father know
them? I do not think we did.
This relationship, loving but unknowing, has characterized the
lives of thousands of Southern children on farms and in the cities
too. White infants learn to feel invisible fences as they crawl, to
sense unwritten boundaries as they walk. And I know this much,
that Negro children are brought up to sense these boundaries too.
What is so often misunderstood, outside the South, is this delicate
intimacy of human beings whose lives are so intricately bound to-

gether. I have met Northerners who believe, in all apparent seri-
ousness, that segregation in the South means literally that: segre-
gation, the races stiffly apart, never touching. A wayfaring stranger
from the New York Herald Tribune implied as much in a piece he
wrote from Virginia after the school decision. His notion was that
whites and Negroes did not even say “good morning” to each
other. God in heaven!
A Close Relationship
In plain fact, the relationship between white and Negro in the seg-
regated South, in the country and in the city, has been far closer,
more honest, less constrained, than such relations generally have
been in the integrated North. In Charleston and New Orleans,
among many other cities, residential segregation does not exist,
for example, as it exists in Detroit or Chicago. In the country,
whites and Negroes are farm neighbors. They share the same
calamities—the mud, the hail, the weevils—and they minister, in
their own unfelt, unspoken way, to one another. Is the relation-
ship that of master and servant, superior and inferior? Down deep,
doubtless it is, but I often wonder if this is more of a wrong to the
Negro than the affected, hearty “equality” encountered in the
North. In the years I lived on a farm, I fished often with a Negro
tenant, hour after hour, he paddling, I paddling, sharing the catch,
and we tied up the boat and casually went our separate ways. Be-
fore Brown v. Board of Education, it never occurred to me that in
these peaceful hours I was inflicting upon him wounds of the psy-
che not likely ever to be undone. I do not believe it occurred to
Robert either. This is not the way one goes fly-casting on a
millpond, with Gunnar Myrdal invisibly present on the middle
thwart. We fish no more. He has been busy in recent years, and I
too; and when I came across the flyrod recently, I found the line
rotted and the ferrules broken.
I say this relationship “has been,” and in the past perfect lies a
melancholy change that disturbs many Southerners deeply. In my
observation, a tendency grows in much of the white South to ac-
knowledge and to abandon, with no more than a ritual protest,
many of the patent absurdities of “Jim Crow.” Many of these prac-
tices, so deeply resented in recent years by the Negro, may have

had some rational basis when they were instituted in the post-
Reconstruction period. When the first trolleys came along, the few
Negroes who rode them were mostly servants; others carried with
them the fragrance of farm or livery stable. A Jim Crow section
perhaps made sense in those days. But in my own nonage, during
the 1920s, and in the years since then, few Southerners ever
paused to examine the reasons for segregation on streetcars. We
simply moved the little portable sign that separated white from
Negro as a car filled up, and whites sat in front of the sign and Ne-
groes sat behind it. This was the way we rode streetcars. After
Brown v. Board of Education, when the abiding subconsciousness
of the Negro turned overnight into an acute and immediate
awareness of the Negro, some of these laws and customs ceased
to be subject to reason anyhow; they became, confusingly, mat-
ters of strategy; they became occupied ground in an undeclared
war, not to be yielded lest their yielding be regarded as needless
surrender. Many aspects of our lives have gone that way since. The
unwritten rules of generations are now being, in truth, unwritten;
in their place, it is proposed by the apostles of instant integration
that there be no rules at all. It seems so easy: “What difference
does the color of a man’s skin make?” “Why not just treat them
as equals?” “There is no such thing as race.”
Ah, but it is not so easy. The ingrained attitudes of a lifetime
cannot be jerked out like a pair of infected molars, and new porce-
lain dentures put in their place. For this is what our Northern
friends will not comprehend: The South, agreeable as it may be to
confessing some of its sins and to bewailing its more manifest
wickednesses, simply does not concede that at bottom its basic at-
titude is “infected” or wrong. On the contrary, the Southerner re-
belliously clings to what seems to him the hard core of truth in
this whole controversy: Here and now, in his own communities,
in the mid-1960s, the Negro race, as a race, plainly is not equal to
the white race, as a race; nor, for that matter, in the wider world
beyond, by the accepted judgment of ten thousand years, has the
Negro race, as a race, ever been the cultural or intellectual equal
of the white race, as a race.
This we take to be a plain statement of fact, and if we are not
amazed that our Northern antagonists do not accept it as such,

we are resentful that they will not even look at the proposition, or
hear of it, or inquire into it. Those of us who have ventured to dis-
cuss the issues outside the South have discovered, whenever the
point arises, that no one is so intolerant of truth as academicians
whose profession it is to pursue it. The whole question of race has
become a closed question: the earth is a cube, and there’s an end
to it; Two and two are four, the sun rises in the east, and no race
is inferior to any other race. Even the possibility of a conflicting
hypothesis is beyond the realm of sober examination. John Hope
Franklin, chairman of the history department at Brooklyn Col-
lege, sees Southern attitudes on race as a “hoax.” Their wrongness
is “indisputable.” To Ashley Montagu, race is a myth. A UNESCO
pamphlet makes the flat, unqualified statement that “modern bi-
ological and psychological studies of the differences between races
do not support the idea that one is superior to another as far as
innate potentialities are concerned.” And when one inquires, why,
pray, has it taken so long for the Negro’s innately equal poten-
tialities to emerge, the answers trail off into lamentations on the
conditions under which the Negro has lived. Thus, the doctrine
of environment, like the principle of charity, is trotted out to con-
ceal a multitude of sins. The fault, if there be any fault, is held to
be not in men’s genes, but in their substandard housing.
All this is to anticipate some of the points this brief is intended
to develop, but it is perhaps as well to know where the argument
is going. The South does not wish to be cruel, or unkind, or in-
tolerant, or bigoted; but in this area it does not wish to be unreal-
istic either. We do not agree that our “prejudice” in this regard is
prejudice at all, in the pejorative sense in which the word is widely
used. The man who wakes up ten times with a hangover, having
had too much brandy the night before, is not “prejudiced” against
brandy if on the eleventh occasion he passes the brandy by; he has
merely learned to respect its qualities. And what others see as the
dark night of our bigotry is regarded, in our own observation, as
the revealing light of experience. It guides our feet. As Patrick
Henry said, we know no other light to go by.
Viewpoint 3
“We conclude that in the field of public education
the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ has no place.”
School Segregation
Is Unconstitutional
Earl Warren
In the 1950s, segregation in the classroom was widely ac-
cepted—and even mandated by law in many southern states.
On May 17, 1954, the Supreme Court unanimously declared in
Brown v. Board of Education that separate educational facilities
were “inherently unequal.” By eradicating one of the legal pillars
of segregation, this landmark ruling not only marked the end of
the “separate but equal” precedent set forth by the Supreme
Court in the 1896 case of Plessy v. Ferguson, it also served as a
catalyst for expanded black rights during the peak years of the
civil rights movement.
The decision of the Court was delivered by Chief Justice Earl
Warren, a Republican California governor who had been ap-
pointed to the Supreme Court in 1953 by President Dwight
Eisenhower. In the following excerpt from the decision, Warren
stresses both the importance of education and the detrimental
effects of school segregation.
Earl Warren, decision, Brown v. Board of Education, 347, U.S. 483, May 17, 1954.
93
T hese cases come to us from the States of Kansas, South Car-

olina, Virginia, and Delaware. They are premised on different
facts and different local conditions, but a common legal question
justifies their consideration together in this consolidated opinion.
In each of the cases, minors of the Negro race, through their le-
gal representatives, seek the aid of the courts in obtaining admis-
sion to the public schools of their community on a nonsegregated
basis. In each instance, they had been denied admission to schools
attended by white children under laws requiring or permitting seg-
regation according to race. This segregation was alleged to deprive
the plaintiffs of the equal protection of the laws under the Four-
teenth Amendment. In each of the cases other than the Delaware
case, a three-judge federal district court denied relief to the plain-
tiffs on the so-called “separate but equal” doctrine announced by
this Court in Plessy v. Ferguson. . . . Under that doctrine, equality
of treatment is accorded when the races are provided substantially
equal facilities, even though these facilities be separate. In the
Delaware case, the Supreme Court of Delaware adhered to that
doctrine, but ordered that the plaintiffs be admitted to the white
schools because of their superiority to the Negro schools.
The plaintiffs contend that segregated public schools are not
“equal” and cannot be made “equal,” and that hence they are de-
prived of the equal protection of the laws. Because of the obvious
importance of the question presented, the Court took jurisdiction.
Argument was heard in the 1952 Term, and reargument was
heard this Term on certain questions propounded by the Court.
The Fourteenth Amendment

Reargument was largely devoted to the circumstances surround-
ing the adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment in 1868. It cov-
ered exhaustively consideration of the Amendment in Congress,
ratification by the states, then existing practices in racial segrega-
tion, and the views of proponents and opponents of the Amend-
ment. This discussion and our own investigation convince us that,
although these sources cast some light, it is not enough to resolve
the problem with which we are faced. At best, they are inconclu-
sive. The most avid proponents of the post-War Amendments un-
doubtedly intended them to remove all legal distinctions among
“all persons born or naturalized in the United States.” Their op-

ponents, just as certainly, were antagonistic to both the letter and
the spirit of the Amendments and wished them to have the most
limited effect. What others in Congress and the state legislatures
had in mind cannot be determined with any degree of certainty.
An additional reason for the inconclusive nature of the Amend-
ment’s history, with respect to segregated schools, is the status of
public education at that time. In the South, the movement toward
free common schools, supported by general taxation, had not yet
taken hold. Education of white children was largely in the hands
of private groups. Education of Negroes was almost nonexistent,
and practically all of the race were illiterate. In fact, any education
of Negroes was forbidden by law in some states. Today, in con-
trast, many Negroes have achieved outstanding success in the arts
and sciences as well as in the business and professional world. It
is true that public school education at the time of the Amendment
had advanced further in the North, but the effect of the Amend-
ment on Northern States was generally ignored in the congres-
sional debates. Even in the North, the conditions of public edu-
cation did not approximate those existing today. The curriculum
was usually rudimentary; ungraded schools were common in ru-
ral areas; the school term was but three months a year in many
states; and compulsory school attendance was virtually unknown.
As a consequence, it is not surprising that there should be so lit-
tle in the history of the Fourteenth Amendment relating to its in-
tended effect on public education.
In the first cases in this Court construing the Fourteenth
Amendment, decided shortly after its adoption, the Court inter-
preted it as proscribing all state-imposed discriminations against
the Negro race. The doctrine of “separate but equal” did not make
its appearance in this Court until 1896 in the case of Plessy v. Fer-
guson, . . . involving not education but transportation. American
courts have since labored with the doctrines for over half a cen-
tury. In this Court, there have been six cases involving the “sepa-
rate but equal” doctrine in the field of public education. In Cum-
ming v. County Board of Education . . . and Gong Lum v. Rice, . . .
the validity of the doctrine itself was not challenged. In more re-
cent cases, all on the graduate school level, inequality was found
in that specific benefits enjoyed by white students were denied to

Negro students of the same educational qualifications. . . . In none
of these cases was it necessary to re-examine the doctrine to grant
relief to the Negro plaintiff. And in Sweatt v. Painter, . . . the Court
expressly reserved decision on the question whether Plessy v. Fer-
guson should be held inapplicable to public education.
In the instant cases, that question is directly presented. Here,
unlike Sweatt v. Painter, there are findings below that the Negro
and white schools involved have been equalized, or are being
equalized, with respect to buildings, curricula, qualifications and
salaries of teachers, and other “tangible” factors. Our decision,
therefore, cannot turn on merely a comparison of these tangible
factors in the Negro and white schools involved in each of the
cases. We must look instead to the effect of segregation itself on
public education.
Segregation and Education

In approaching this problem, we cannot turn the clock back to
1868 when the Amendment was adopted, or even to 1896 when
Plessy v. Ferguson was written. We must consider public educa-
tion in the light of its full development and its present place in
American life throughout the Nation. Only in this way can it be
determined if segregation in public schools deprives these plain-
tiffs of the equal protection of the laws.
Today, education is perhaps the most important function of
state and local governments. Compulsory school attendance laws
and the great expenditures for education both demonstrate our
recognition of the importance of education to our democratic so-
ciety. It is required in the performance of our most basic public
responsibilities, even service in the armed forces. It is the very
foundation of good citizenship. Today it is a principal instrument
in awakening the child to cultural values, in preparing him for
later professional training, and in helping him to adjust normally
to his environment. In these days, it is doubtful that any child may
reasonably be expected to succeed in life if he is denied the op-
portunity of an education. Such an opportunity, where the state
has undertaken to provide it, is a right which must be made avail-
able to all on equal terms.
We come then to the question presented: Does segregation of

children in public schools solely on the basis of race, even though
the physical facilities and other “tangible” factors may be equal,
deprive the children of the minority group of equal educational
opportunities? We believe that it does.
In Sweatt v. Painter, . . . in finding that a segregated law school
for Negroes could not provide them equal educational opportu-
nities, this Court relied in large part on “those qualities which are
incapable of objective measurement but which make for greatness
in a law school.” In McLaurin v. Oklahoma State Regents, . . . the
Court, in requiring that a Negro admitted to a white graduate
school be treated like all other students, again resorted to intan-
gible considerations: “. . . his ability to study, to engage in discus-
sions and exchange views with other students, and, in general, to
learn his profession.” Such considerations apply with added force
to children in grade and high schools. To separate them from oth-
ers of similar age and qualifications solely because of their race
generates a feeling of inferiority as to their status in the commu-
nity that may affect their hearts and minds in a way unlikely ever
to be undone. The effect of this separation on their educational
opportunities was well stated by a finding in the Kansas case by a
court which nevertheless felt compelled to rule against the Negro
plaintiffs:
Segregation of white and colored children in public schools
has a detrimental effect upon the colored children. The im-
pact is greater when it has the sanction of the law; for the pol-
icy of separating the races is usually interpreted as denoting
the inferiority of the negro group. A sense of inferiority af-
fects the motivation of a child to learn. Segregation with the
sanction of law, therefore, has a tendency to [retard] the ed-
ucation and mental development of negro children and to de-
prive them of some of the benefits they would receive in a
racial[ly] integrated school system.
Whatever may have been the extent of psychological knowledge
at the time of Plessy v. Ferguson, this finding is amply supported
by modern authority. Any language in Plessy v. Ferguson contrary
to this finding is rejected.
Separate and Unequal

We conclude that in the field of public education the doctrine of
“separate but equal” has no place. Separate educational facilities
are inherently unequal. Therefore, we hold that the plaintiffs and
others similarly situated for whom the actions have been brought
are, by reason of the segregation complained of, deprived of the
equal protection of the laws guaranteed by the Fourteenth
Amendment. This disposition makes unnecessary any discussion
whether such segregation also violates the Due Process Clause of
the Fourteenth Amendment.
Because these are class actions, because of the wide applicability
of this decision, and because of the great variety of local condi-
tions, the formulation of decrees in these cases presents problems
of considerable complexity. On reargument, the consideration of
appropriate relief was necessarily subordinated to the primary
question—the constitutionality of segregation on public educa-
tion. We have now announced that such segregation is a denial of
the equal protection of the laws. In order that we may have the full
assistance of the parties in formulating decrees, the cases will be
restored to the docket, and the parties are requested to present fur-
ther argument on Questions 4 and 5 previously propounded by
the Court for the reargument this Term. The Attorney General of
the United States is again invited to participate. The Attorneys
General of the states requiring or permitting segregation in pub-
lic education will also be permitted to appear as Amici Curiae upon
request, to do so by September 15, 1954, and submission of briefs
by October 1, 1954.
Viewpoint 4
“This unwarranted exercise of power by the Court,
contrary to the Constitution, is creating chaos and
confusion in the States principally affected.”
The Government
Should Not Interfere
in School Segregation
Southern Manifesto
In 1954 the Supreme Court declared in Brown v. Board of Edu-
cation that the segregation of public schools is unconstitutional.
At the same time that the landmark ruling buoyed the hopes of
those within the civil rights movement, however, it compelled
the more ardent segregationists to launch an offensive. To
maintain the Jim Crow status quo, for example, many southern
whites employed a variety of legal and political tactics to under-
mine and circumvent desegregation. One of the most flagrant
statements against integration is the rebuttal by southern leaders
to the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown. The Southern Mani-
festo, reprinted here, states that the Supreme Court has no right
to override the authority of the states, or “substitute naked
power for established law.” In 1956 over one hundred southern
senators and representatives signed the Southern Manifesto,
promising to resist federal efforts to desegregate the schools.
Southern Manifesto, “Southern Manifesto: Declaration of Constitutional

Principles,” Congressional Record, 84th congress, 2nd session, March 12, 1956.
99
T he unwarranted decision of the Supreme Court in the public

school cases is now bearing the fruit always produced when
men substitute naked power for established law.
The Founding Fathers gave us a Constitution of checks and bal-
ances because they realized the inescapable lesson of history that
no man or group of men can be safely entrusted with unlimited
power. They framed this Constitution with its provisions for
change by amendment in order to secure the fundamentals of
government against the dangers of temporary popular passion or
the personal predilections of public office-holders.
An Abuse of Power
We regard the decision of the Supreme Court in the school cases
as a clear abuse of judicial power. It climaxes a trend in the Fed-
eral Judiciary undertaking to legislate, in derogation of the au-
thority of Congress, and to encroach upon the reserved rights of
the States and the people.
The original Constitution does not mention education. Neither
does the 14th amendment nor any other amendment. The debates
preceding the submission of the 14th amendment clearly show
that there was no intent that it should affect the system of educa-
tion maintained by the States.
The very Congress which proposed the amendment subsequently
provided for segregated schools in the District of Columbia.
When the amendment was adopted in 1868, there were 37
States of the Union. Every one of the 26 States that had any sub-
stantial racial differences among its people, either approved the
operation of segregated schools already in existence or subse-
quently established such schools by action of the same lawmak-
ing body which considered the 14th amendment.
As admitted by the Supreme Court in the public school case
(Brown v. Board of Education), the doctrine of separate but equal
schools “apparently originated in Roberts v. City of Boston (1849),
upholding school segregation against attack as being violative of a
State constitutional guarantee of equality.” This constitutional doc-
trine began in the North, not in the South, and it was followed not
only in Massachusetts, but in Connecticut, New York, Illinois, In-
diana, Michigan, Minnesota, New Jersey, Ohio, Pennsylvania and
other northern States until they, exercising their rights as States

through the constitutional processes of local self-government,
changed their school systems.
In the case of Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896 the Supreme Court ex-
pressly declared that under the 14th amendment no person was
denied any of his rights if the States provided separate but equal
public facilities. This decision has been followed in many other
cases. It is notable that the Supreme Court, speaking through
Chief Justice [William H.] Taft, a former President of the United
States, unanimously declared in 1927 in Lum v. Rice that the “sep-
arate but equal” principle is “within the discretion of the State in
regulating its public schools and does not conflict with the 14th
amendment.”
This interpretation, restated time and again, became a part of
the life of the people of many of the States and confirmed their
habits, customs, traditions, and way of life. It is founded on ele-
mental humanity and commonsense, for parents should not be
deprived by Government of the right to direct the lives and edu-
cation of their own children.
Though there has been no constitutional amendment or act of
Congress changing this established legal principle almost a cen-
tury old, the Supreme Court of the United States, with no legal
basis for such action, undertook to exercise their naked judicial
power and substituted their personal political and social ideas for
the established law of the land.
This unwarranted exercise of power by the Court, contrary to
the Constitution, is creating chaos and confusion in the States
principally affected. It is destroying the amicable relations between
the white and Negro races that have been created through 90 years
of patient effort by the good people of both races. It has planted
hatred and suspicion where there has been heretofore friendship
and understanding.
Without regard to the consent of the governed, outside agita-
tors are threatening immediate and revolutionary changes in our
public-school systems. If done, this is certain to destroy the sys-
tem of public education in some of the States.
With the gravest concern for the explosive and dangerous con-
dition created by this decision and inflamed by outside meddlers:
We reaffirm our reliance on the Constitution as the funda-

mental law of the land.
We decry the Supreme Court’s encroachments on rights re-
Statement and Proclamation of

Governor George C. Wallace
Among those who gained notoriety for their white supremacist
views was Alabama governor George C. Wallace, who won his
1962 gubernatorial campaign with promises to defend the state’s
right to maintain segregation in its schools. Months after his in-
auguration, Wallace had a chance to fulfill his pledge. On June
11, 1963, Wallace read his proclamation, excerpted here, as he at-
tempted to block two black students from entering the University
of Alabama. The governor stepped aside only when the federal-
ized Alabama National Guard arrived.
The unwelcomed, unwanted, unwarranted and force-induced
intrusion upon the campus of the University of Alabama to-
day of the might of the Central Government offers frightful ex-
ample of the oppression of the rights, privileges and sover-
eignty of this State by officers of the Federal Government. This
intrusion results solely from force, or threat of force, undigni-
fied by any reasonable application of the principle of law, rea-
son and justice. It is important that the people of this State and
nation understand that this action is in violation of rights re-
served to the State by the Constitution of the United States and
the Constitution of the State of Alabama. While some few may
applaud these acts, millions of Americans will gaze in sorrow
upon the situation existing at this great institution of learning.
Only the Congress makes the law of the United States. To
this date no statutory authority can be cited to the people of
this Country which authorizes the Central Government to ig-
nore the sovereignty of this State in an attempt to subordinate
the rights of Alabama amid millions of Americans. There has
been no legislative action by Congress justifying this intrusion.
served to the States and to the people, contrary to established law,

and to the Constitution.
We commend the motives of those States which have declared
When the Constitution of the United States was enacted, a

government was formed upon the premise that people, as in-
dividuals are endowed with the rights of life, liberty, and prop-
erty, and with the right of self-government. The people and
their local self-governments formed a Central Government and
conferred upon it certain stated and limited powers. All other
powers were reserved to the states and to the people.
Strong local government is the foundation of our system and
must be continually guarded and maintained. The Tenth
Amendment to the Constitution of the United States reads as
follows:
“The powers not delegated to the United States by the Con-
stitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to
the states respectively, or to the people.”
This amendment sustains the right of self-government and
grants the State of Alabama the right to enforce its laws and
regulate its internal affairs.
This nation was never meant to be a unit of one . . . but a
united [sic] of the many . . . this is the exact reason our free-
dom loving forefathers established the states, so as to divide the
rights and powers among the states, insuring that no central
power could gain master government control.
There can be no submission to the theory that the Central
Government is anything but a servant of the people. We are a
God-fearing people—not government-fearing people. We
practice today the free heritage bequeathed to us by the Found-
ing Fathers.
“Statement and Proclamation of George C. Wallace,” University of Al-

abama, June 11, 1963.
the intention to resist forced integration by any lawful means.

We appeal to the States and people who are not directly affected
by these decisions to consider the constitutional principles in-
volved against the time when they too, on issues vital to them,
may be the victims of judicial encroachment.
Even though we constitute a minority in the present Congress,
we have full faith that a majority of the American people believe
in the dual system of government which has enabled us to achieve
our greatness and will in time demand that the reserved rights of
the States and of the people be made secure against judicial
usurpation.
We pledge ourselves to use all lawful means to bring about a re-
versal of this decision which is contrary to the Constitution and
to prevent the use of force in its implementation.
In this trying period, as we all seek to right this wrong, we appeal
to our people not to be provoked by the agitators and trouble-
makers invading our States and to scrupulously refrain from dis-
order and lawless acts.
Viewpoint 5
“Brown set the modern stage for us to begin
building an America which fulfills its promise of
equality and justice for blacks and other
minorities.”
Julius L. Chambers
The Supreme Court’s landmark decision in Brown v. Board of
Education has been hailed by many as the most important ruling
of the twentieth century. Attorney Julius L. Chambers is among
those who finds Brown “one of this civilization’s proudest
achievements.” In the short term, the Brown ruling boosted
black educational opportunities by eradicating segregation in
the classroom. On a larger scale, and perhaps more importantly,
the legal precedents set forth in Brown shaped the civil rights
movement for decades to come.
At the same time, Brown has weathered much criticism—most
notably from opponents who view the decision as an ineffectual
vehicle for the promotion of racial justice. Chambers warns
against this tendency to denigrate Brown against a “thicket of re-
visionist historical arguments.” According to Chambers, Brown,
Julius L. Chambers, “Brown v. Board of Education,” Race in America: The Struggle
for Equality, edited by Herbert Hill and James E. Jones. Madison: University of
Wisconsin Press, 1993. Copyright © 1993 by The Board of Regents of the Uni-
versity of Wisconsin System. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission.
105
whatever its limitations, cannot be held responsible for all the

impediments—which have been fueled by three centuries of
racial oppression—that continue to affect black and other mi-
nority schoolchildren. Chambers is a civil rights attorney, ac-
tivist, and educator. He lectures at many law schools and has
written numerous articles and books on civil rights.
T he quality and moral worth of any civilization should be mea-

sured by the ability of all of its citizens to fulfill their poten-
tial, to be the best that they can be. And given that definition,
when we consider the vast numbers of minority children who lack
even the hope of gaining the basic tools needed to be productive
and fulfilled citizens, it is easy to feel that this “American civiliza-
tion” is a contradiction in terms.
But many of us do not believe that. Many of us have not given
up the dream of equal opportunity and equal rights for all citi-
zens. For us, one of this civilization’s proudest achievements is the
Brown v. Board of Education decision. I believe that, for all of its
flaws, for all that it did not accomplish, Brown set the modern
stage for us to begin building an America which fulfills its promise
of equality and justice for blacks and other minorities. If we spend
a moment reflecting on what we thought Brown had achieved in
those heady days in the mid-fifties and then look at what we have
actually achieved, it will help us define the work that remains to
be done, as we try to shape an American civilization we would like
our children and grandchildren to be part of.
When Brown was decided, I was a young teenager in a small,
segregated high school in rural North Carolina. I remember gath-
ering with my schoolmates and teachers after class and celebrat-
ing. As lay people, we sincerely believed that Brown marked the
end of the unequal, inadequate education provided to blacks
throughout the South. We honestly thought that blacks would
suddenly be able to attend the schools of their choice, the “good”
white schools, or previously black schools that would be im-
proved. We thought that we would get access to better facilities,
and have a much better chance to make something of ourselves.
If we thought about the nature of law at all, we assumed that
Brown was self-executing. The law had been announced, and now
people would have to obey it. Wasn’t that how things worked in
America, even in white America?
Brown’s Limitations
That kind of naivete was not limited to the children and adults of
Montgomery County, North Carolina. It also extended to many
of the civil rights lawyers who fought to make Brown possible.
They believed, correctly, I think, that segregated education was
the weak link in the chain of laws that maintained all separate fa-
cilities for southern blacks. Once that link was broken, they as-
sumed, the entire chain would collapse. But many of them took
their exultation one step further: they also believed that racism it-
self would vanish. Once “separate but equal” was no longer the
law of the land, separate and unequal would stop being a fact of
everyday life. Once blacks and whites started learning together,
they would start living together, working together, building a so-
ciety where race did not limit destiny.
At the time, only a few isolated voices in the black community
called attention to Brown’s serious limitations. W.E.B. Du Bois un-
derstood that integration alone could not be equated with quality
education. He knew that integration alone could not solve the per-
sistent, daunting educational and emotional problems of many ur-
ban and rural black students, problems that were the direct result
of poverty and continuing racism. A few others pointed out what
eventually became abundantly clear: even if the often passionate
and violent resistance to southern school desegregation could be
overcome, even if the Little Rocks and the Birminghams could be
integrated, it would not necessarily change increasingly segregated
housing patterns in the rest of the country. And those segregated
housing patterns—with largely minority central cities and largely
white suburbs—would perpetuate unequal education. Nor would
school integration alone necessarily change persistent racism.
Nevertheless, those voices were few and far between at the time.
And today, hindsight being 20/20, one doesn’t have to be an ed-
ucational expert to see that much of what Du Bois said was true,
and that the dreams and expectations of so many of us after Brown
have been confounded. My friend Derrick Bell and others have
argued, quite persuasively, that Brown and related Court decisions

have only served the interests of the white majority. Since the de-
cision did not really address Du Bois’ concern, did not focus on
the complex set of barriers that black students must overcome to
have productive futures, it only served to siphon off conveniently
and painlessly the discontent of minorities. Brown, the argument
goes, gave blacks enough legal crumbs to satisfy them for a time,
while the rest of America continued its feast.
But I believe that this argument is faulty when it implies that the
Court in Brown should have addressed all the barriers and prob-
lems that it did not address. The Court was hewing to its traditional
role of making decisions on the basis of the facts and circumstances
of the case before it. In that case, the conclusion it reached was
patently obvious and remains true today: segregated schooling is
inherently unequal, because it inevitably results in the unequal dis-
tribution of educational resources. In taking steps to end that seg-
regation, the Court could not possibly have addressed all the im-
pediments that have prevented millions of minority youngsters
from getting an adequate education. Only a visionary like Du Bois
was able to see those impediments clearly, and unfortunately vi-
sionaries are often taken seriously only after they have left us.
Yet as much as we should respect Du Bois for his contributions
to this ongoing argument, I believe his ultimate conclusion—
putting most of our priorities on improving black institutions, at
the expense of integration—was wrong. [There are] barriers we
must still overcome in order to fulfill the dreams and expectations
that Brown created. But first, it is important to assert that the fail-
ure to meet those expectations should not lead us to conclude that
the goals enunciated in Brown were misguided, or even based on
false hopes. It is important that we do not lose sight of one prin-
ciple amidst the thicket of revisionist historical arguments about
Brown: integrated schools do improve the educational opportu-
nities available to black students. And in doing so, integrated
schools contribute a great deal to the social and economic progress
that should be the goal of all races.
We must not overlook the studies by Professor Robert L. Crain
at Columbia University and others which show that the earlier
black students are exposed to integrated educational settings, the
more impressive their gains in raising scholastic achievements.

Crain has shown that one-fifth of the achievement gap between
black and white students disappears within the first two years of
school integration. Other studies, cited in the National Research
Council’s A Common Destiny, show that blacks attending desegre-
gated schools are more likely to attend desegregated institutions of
higher learning. And they are more likely than blacks from
majority-black schools to major in scientific and technical fields.
Without simplifying or glossing over the problems that confront
us, it is vital for us not to lose sight of the fact that school integra-
tion has many, varied, and positive outcomes for minority students.
But the benefits of integration are not limited to minorities.
They also extend to that white power structure with which Der-
rick Bell is so concerned. Many of the corporate leaders with
whom I come in contact understand that blacks and other mi-
norities will constitute 40 percent of our workforce by the year
2000. And they know that it is in their interest to make sure that
our children are adequately trained, if only to keep the engines of
capitalism running. Since the data show that integrated education
is one key to quality education—though certainly not the only
key—corporate America is just beginning to understand its value.
And finally, integrated education remains the best way to pre-
pare all students—both black and white—for the complex, mul-
ticultural, multiracial society which they’ll soon be joining. Stud-
ies show that students in desegregated schools are more likely to
live, work, and develop friendships with people of different races.
That is why continuing to walk on the path of integration that
started with Brown is crucial not only to blacks, but to all Ameri-
cans. Again, the solution offered by Brown is certainly no panacea.
. . . But it is important to note that, right now, one of the princi-
pal threats to quality education for all is the growing resegrega-
tion of America’s public schools.
Resegregation
More children attend racially isolated schools today than in the
early seventies. Almost two-thirds of minority elementary and sec-
ondary students attend schools in which minorities make up more
than half the student body. Nearly one-fifth attend schools in
which 99 to 100 percent of the students are minorities.

I’m sure I don’t need to dwell on the obvious: this educational
segregation is generally a direct result of economics and of hous-
ing segregation, problems Brown did not address. It is not un-
common for a single metropolitan area to have 40 or more school
districts, with a vastly disproportionate concentration of blacks—
many of whom are poor—in the central city, and a dispropor-
tionate concentration of whites in the suburbs.
Now, you’d think that a government trying to build the kind of
civilization in which we want to live would make efforts both to
integrate schools effectively and to help minorities and the poor
escape from the substandard, segregated inner-city housing that
is a major factor in school segregation today. Yet our federal and
local governments have used housing patterns and poverty as ex-
cuses for inaction when it comes to school integration. There has
been essentially no progress in urban-suburban school desegre-
gation on the national level since the Milliken v. Bradley decision
in 1974. In that ruling, the Supreme Court struck down a lower
court decision ordering the busing of children across district lines
as the only practicable way to achieve meaningful integration in
the Detroit metropolitan area.
Additionally, in recent years, the Justice Department and many
lower courts have quite openly tried to undermine many success-
ful desegregation plans, especially in the South. Increasingly, courts
are ruling that racial imbalances in the schools are the result of seg-
regated housing or demographic trends, not the vestiges of past dis-
crimination. With the support of the Justice Department, more and
more school districts are trying to take advantage of these rulings
and are asking the courts to declare that they have achieved unitary
status—which means that courts consider that the districts have al-
ready eliminated past discrimination and are operating desegre-
gated schools. Once school districts achieve this so-called unitary
status, they no longer have the legal duty to eliminate the continu-
ing vestiges of their racially dual school systems, and black plaintiffs
have to prove “intentional discrimination” to obtain relief. Thus,
with a unitary-status declaration, school systems can literally ignore
the problems that disproportionately affect black and poor children
and can easily return to the segregated patterns of the past.
In early 1988, the Justice Department announced that it would

seek to dismiss nearly 300 school desegregation suits and dissolve
injunctions requiring school districts to maintain desegregation.
The pretext for the federal action was that these districts were
unitary.
Fortunately, thanks to a great many dedicated civil rights attor-
neys, the Justice Department has had only limited success thus far.
But the department under the [George H.W.] Bush administra-
tion has not stopped this assault on integrated education.
In the face of these trends, a major part of our efforts must be
directed toward preserving past gains and to continuing litigation
that will effectively integrate all schools—urban, suburban and
rural. Although I have noted that there has been no major na-
tionwide progress in this area, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund
has won several important desegregation suits. In Natchez, Mis-
sissippi, for example, formerly all-black and predominately white
schools were consolidated in 1989. And the school district there
was integrated after the local school board had fought against de-
segregation for two decades.
But obviously, preserving and increasing integration is only one
part of the job. To fulfill the dreams and expectations we had af-
ter Brown, we must move beyond Brown. That means rectifying
the complex set of problems created by three centuries of racial
oppression, and the remaining vestiges of a system which at one
time legally denied most blacks the right to any education. That
means overcoming the diverse barriers to equal educational op-
portunities that perhaps were not wholly understood in 1954. . . .
Thirty-five years after Brown, I am not content with simply crit-
icizing Brown’s failures or its incomplete implementation. I see
too many black and poor children crying every day for an oppor-
tunity to learn and to succeed. I also see a country on the brink of
more racial and economic strife, with both federal and state gov-
ernmental entities neglecting their duties and responsibilities un-
der the Constitution. It is incumbent on all of us to play whatever
role we can, in whatever forum, to fulfill the dream of Brown and
the Constitution. For me, that means the continued pursuit of ef-
forts to enforce Brown. To others, it may mean using other fo-
rums. Whatever approach we choose, I remain optimistic that the
dreams we once had in that little classroom in North Carolina

eventually will become a reality. And that all of us, in the words
of Justice Marshall, will witness an American society where the
poor black kid in Mississippi or Harlem or Watts will have the
same educational opportunity as the rich white kid of Stamford,
Connecticut.
Viewpoint 6
“Brown represents a failed decision in the long term
because it helped shape certain ideas about racial
identity that proved to be ultimately self-defeating.”
Louis Anthes
It is commonly believed that the Supreme Court’s 1954 decision
in Brown v. Board of Education, which declared segregated
schools unconstitutional, was a landmark event in the struggle
to integrate blacks into the American mainstream. In the fol-
lowing viewpoint, Louis Anthes rejects this assessment. Instead,
he argues that the Brown decision was ineffective in the short
term and counterproductive in the long term. Despite the deci-
sion, Anthes points out, the schools remained segregated well
into the 1960s. When segregation did finally occur, he adds, it
was the result not of Brown but of the efforts of grassroots ac-
tivists. In addition, because the ruling characterized blacks as
victimized individuals rather than as an oppressed group, it
opened the door for critics of affirmative action policies de-
signed to correct systemic discrimination in America. Anthes is
Louis Anthes, “In the Short Term Brown Did Not Help African-Americans
Achieve True Equality, and in the Long Term It Has Become Implicated in
the Reaction Against Affirmative Action,” History in Dispute, Vol. 2: Ameri-
can Social and Political Movements, 1945–2000: Pursuit of Liberty, edited by
Robert J. Allen. Detroit: St. James Press, 2000. Copyright © 2000 by The
Gale Group, Inc. Reproduced by permission.
113
a scholar of U.S. legal history and the author of Lawyers and Im-
migrants, 1870–1940: A Cultural History.
B rown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas (1954) was the

result of a long-standing legal campaign waged by the Na-
tional Association for the Advancement of Colored People
(NAACP), and its legal arm, the Legal Defense Fund (LDF), to
remedy the effects of Jim Crow laws, which segregated public fa-
cilities along racial lines throughout many southern states. Start-
ing in the 1930s, the NAACP, led by Thurgood Marshall and
Charles Hamilton Houston, sued state and local governments us-
ing the Supreme Court’s decision in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896),
which had held that Jim Crow laws did not inherently violate the
Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Plessy’s
doctrine—known as “separate but equal”—helped to legitimate
poor physical maintenance of black public institutions, low pay
for black public workers, and dismal employment prospects for
blacks. At first Marshall and the NAACP tried to enforce the “sep-
arate but equal” doctrine by bringing suits against governments
to make them equally support segregated public facilities. This
strategy of enforcing Plessy, however, increasingly seemed im-
practical. Therefore, NAACP lawyers began focusing on over-
turning Plessy itself.
By the late 1940s, following a series of legal victories for the
NAACP in which the Supreme Court ruled that racial segregation
related to election primaries (Smith v. Allwright in 1944), housing
(Shelley v. Kraemer in 1948), and law school admissions (Sweatt v.
Painter in 1950) was unconstitutional, Marshall turned his atten-
tion to public schools. At the time few public schools were inte-
grated in many of the districts straddling the Ohio River and
Mason-Dixon Line. In states further south, almost all public
schools were racially segregated by law. By taking Brown to the
Supreme Court, Marshall presented to the justices the heroic op-
portunity to overrule Plessy and steer the country on a course to-
ward racial equality under the law. In 1954 the Court embraced the
opportunity and made an attempt at ending segregation. Despite
good intentions, Brown did not meet its authors’ expectations.
Short-Term Failure
First, it failed in the short term, because for ten years most pub-
lic schools in the South remained radically segregated. In North
Carolina and Virginia, for instance, less than one-tenth of 1 per-
cent of black children attended desegregated schools seven years
after Brown. In South Carolina, Alabama, and Mississippi not one
black child attended an integrated public grade school in the
1962–1963 school year. One historian, Michael Klarman, char-
acterized the results of Brown: “For ten years, 1954–1964, virtu-
ally nothing happened.”
Part of the reason for Brown’s ineffectiveness was that it failed
to offer lower courts bold legal remedies to achieve its objectives.
Brown, in fact, consisted of two separate opinions, referred to as
“Brown I” and “Brown II.” Brown I provided the legal, moral, and
social-scientific justifications for racial integration of public
schools, and, in a much criticized ruling, Brown II set forth vague
remedies to achieve Brown I by declaring that desegregation be
pursued “with all deliberate speed.” This rhetoric signaled the jus-
tice’s hope that school districts would develop their own timeta-
bles for desegregation that would be consistent with Brown. In-
stead, most school districts did nothing, and in some cases local
politicians, most infamously Governor Orval Faubus, cynically
stymied the integration of public schools by blaming the Supreme
Court for illegitimately interfering in southern institutions. Thus,
rather than supplementing the high-minded principles of Brown
I with detailed legal rules, Brown II failed to give lawyers and
judges any legal weapons to wield in concrete cases as local school
boards and politicans flouted constitutional laws.
Unintended Consequences
Though it may be accurate to say that Brown eventually con-
tributed to desegregation of public schools by the late 1960s and
early 1970s, it is also true that such change was not directly the re-
sult of the action of the Court, and, in fact, largely resulted from
grassroots efforts. In particular, the Civil Rights movement fos-
tered dozens of confrontations involving students, demonstrators,
troublemakers, police, lawyers, and federal troops. Rather than
Brown, it was these confrontations that drew the attention of tele-
vision cameras, thereby shocking moderate white voters, most of

whom were otherwise deeply indifferent to issues concerning
racial justice. Only after President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the
1964 Civil Rights Act, in response to the organized pressure of the
leaders of the Civil Rights movement, most prominently Martin
Luther King Jr., can one observe a clear change in the reporting
of the racial make-up of formerly segregated schools. In this light,
Brown’s beneficial consequences appear unintended, as the deci-
sion helped to foster the dramatic, and often brutal, conflicts from
which eventually emerged political support for the desegregation
of public schools.
Second, Brown failed because it helped focus Northern atten-
tion away from itself and toward the South, thereby obscuring
how suburban development in the North fostered its own patterns
of racial segregation. By changing property, zoning, and tax laws,
northern voters intensified school segregation in the late 1960s
through the 1970s and 1980s—at the same time politicians de-
vised a vocabulary to name urban spaces inhabited by African
Americans as the “inner city.” Though achieved without Jim Crow
laws, Northern segregation was indistinguishable from its south-
ern counterpart, except that Brown, by itself, provided little equip-
ment to name it as such.
Long-Term Harm
Finally, Brown represents a failed decision in the long term be-
cause it helped shape certain ideas about racial identity that
proved to be ultimately self-defeating. Though intended to ac-
complish many things, the decision helped portray blacks as pow-
erless and victimized. As argued by historian Daryl Michael Scott,
in Contempt and Pity: Social Policy and the Image of the Damaged
Black Psyche, 1880–1996 (1997), Brown represented the black
mind as “damaged” by racism and racial segregation. Indeed,
among Chief Justice Warren’s stated reasons for ending segrega-
tion was his view that public education helped a child “to adjust
normally to his environment.” According to Warren, since black
schools were legally segregated, and thereby rendered inferior, the
law failed to mainstream and normalize black children to Amer-
ican society. According to Scott, “Warren had crafted a psychi-
atric appeal that subtly but effectively conveyed the plight of the
victim without censuring the guilty.”
Warren’s nod to psychology in his opinion was related to the
Supreme Court’s intellectual commitment to individualism in the
1950s and 1960s. By talking about racial justice in psychological
terms, the Court made it appear that racism mainly resulted in in-
dividual pain and suffering rather than collective struggle. Failing
to call attention to the shared history of African-Americans re-
sisting slavery and struggling both within and against segregation,
Warren caricatured African-Americans as individuals victimized
by law. Thus, their difference from whites was judicially rendered
as a simple legal difference, the erasure of which promised to ef-
fect a liberation of all individual Americans.
By eliding the history of black public institutions and achieve-
ments of African-Americans in the name of normalizing individ-
uals through constitutional law, the Supreme Court helped rein-
force a broader consensus about individual happiness then
dominating postwar American culture. An important and over-
looked consequence of this post-Brown valorization of the nor-
mal and happy individual has been an inability for judges in the
last two decades to provide an intellectual bulwark supporting af-
firmative action against its critics.
Affirmative action represents a conscious attempt to consider
race in the redistribution of public resources, but, as its critics read-
ily complain, race-conscious remedies often perpetuate collective
racial identities that appear to contradict the goal of rewarding and
promoting individual talent. At their worst, critics of affirmative
action argue, with Brown in mind, that the law should neither dis-
criminate according to race nor acknowledge its political relevance
at all. Often they uphold the vision of a “color-blind” Constitution,
as Harlan expressed in Plessy. They also argue that race hardly mat-
ters any longer, or they argue that it has been transformed into
something of a collective national identity, which all Americans
supposedly share. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia has writ-
ten in a recent Supreme Court opinion that limited affirmative ac-
tion: “In the eyes of the government, we are just one race here. It
is American.” By celebrating American identity in racially explicit
terms, critics of affirmative action such as Scalia cynically appro-
priate Brown’s vision of an integrated society. At the same time,

however, Scalia’s reading of Brown is not tortured. His bad-faith
appropriations can be read as ironically consistent with Brown’s
promotion of equality under the Constitution, since the decision
elevates as one of its goals the education of normal, individual
Americans enjoying the fruits of affluence.
Brown is viewed today as a fixed star in the constellation of
American rights. If viewed from another perspective, the most im-
portant Supreme Court decision of the twentieth century appears
to have had little social effect as intended. It also appears to have
disserved African-Americans by hampering the struggle against
ways of thinking in racist terms. Therefore, the promotion of
racial justice may require going back to Brown, reconsidering first
principles, and reaching for something deeper than normalizing
people into the affluence of an imagined American race.
W E
S
IN WORLD HISTORY
CHAPTER 3
What Were the

Strategies of the
Civil Rights
Movement?
S
E
Chapter Preface
F ollowing the emancipation of the slaves, a variety of individu-

als and organizations rose to the political fore to advance racial
justice and equality. Despite a few significant gains that forced a
modicum of change—the creation of constitutional amendments
that established citizenship rights and guaranteed voting rights
and equal protection of the law, for example—progress in the civil
rights arena was slow, if not nonexistent at times. Not until the
1950s, after almost a century of efforts on the part of blacks, would
the issue of civil rights become a nationally celebrated cause.
The civil rights movement that blossomed in full force between
1954 and 1965 produced a number of remarkable leaders and or-
ganizations committed to the cause of racial justice. During this
time of profound upheaval, there was little consensus on how to
best secure the rights that had long been denied to black Ameri-
cans. Some, most notably Thurgood Marshall and the National As-
sociation for the Advancement of Colored People, thought that
change could be effected only through legal means. Martin Luther
King Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference en-
dorsed nonviolent direct-action campaigns—marches, strikes, and
rallies—to draw attention to their cause. At the same time, Mal-
colm X, Stokely Carmichael, and others came to believe that these
strategies were overly cautious and instead advocated more retal-
iatory and confrontational measures. While some denounced these
more militant tactics on the grounds that they would impede the
process of integration, others did not want to assimilate into white
society at all. Many, indeed, believed that their only chance for en-
hanced rights lay in the establishment of an African homeland. Still
others debated the role of whites in the freedom struggle, the im-
pact of federal legislation, and even the relationship between civil
rights and the women’s movement. The following chapter repre-
sents a small sampling of the wide array of views and opinions that
informed and shaped the struggle for civil rights.
120
Viewpoint 1
“We have a right to expect that the Negro
community will be responsible, will uphold the law,
but they have a right to expect the law will be fair.”
Federal Legislation
Will Strengthen Civil
Rights
John F. Kennedy
John F. Kennedy’s ascendancy to the White House in 1960 gen-
erated hope among blacks that the federal government would
lend support to the burgeoning civil rights movement. Ken-
nedy, though, took a somewhat moderate stance on racial issues
during the first part of his presidency. By 1963, however, pres-
sure for racial equality was mounting, particularly in Alabama,
where violent confrontations between demonstrators and police
in Birmingham were gaining national attention. At the same
time, the state’s governor, George Wallace, was making head-
lines as he attempted to defy the court-ordered integration of
the University of Alabama by personally blocking the entrance
of two black students.
In response to these highly publicized events, Kennedy took
action: On June 11, 1963, the president addressed the issue of
civil rights—and rising racial violence—before the American
John F. Kennedy, radio and television address to the American people, June
11, 1963.
121
public. In his televised speech, excerpted here, Kennedy both

endorses the goals of the civil rights movement and proposes
federal legislation as a means to racial equality.
G ood evening, my fellow citizens.

This afternoon, following a series of threats and defiant
statements, the presence of Alabama National Guardsmen was re-
quired on the University of Alabama to carry out the final and un-
equivocal order of the United States District Court of the North-
ern District of Alabama. That order called for the admission of
two clearly qualified young Alabama residents who happened to
have been born Negro.
That they were admitted peacefully on the campus is due in
good measure to the conduct of the students of the University of
Alabama, who met their responsibilities in a constructive way.
I hope that every American, regardless of where he lives, will
stop and examine his conscience about this and other related in-
cidents. This Nation was founded by men of many nations and
backgrounds. It was founded on the principle that all men are cre-
ated equal, and that the rights of every man are diminished when
the rights of one man are threatened.
Today we are committed to a worldwide struggle to promote
and protect the rights of all who wish to be free. And when Amer-
icans are sent to Viet-Nam or West Berlin, we do not ask for
whites only. It ought to be possible, therefore, for American stu-
dents of any color to attend any public institution they select with-
out having to be backed up by troops.
It ought to be possible for American consumers of any color to
receive equal service in places of public accommodation, such as
hotels and restaurants and theaters and retail stores, without be-
ing forced to resort to demonstrations in the street, and it ought
to be possible for American citizens of any color to register and to
vote in a free election without interference or fear of reprisal.
It ought to be possible, in short, for every American to enjoy the
privileges of being American without regard to his race or his
color. In short, every American ought to have the right to be
WHAT WERE THE STRATEGIES ? 123
treated as he would wish to be treated, as one would wish his chil-

dren to be treated. But this is not the case.
The Negro baby born in America today, regardless of the sec-
tion of the Nation in which he is born, has about one-half as much
chance of completing a high school as a white baby born in the
same place on the same day, one-third as much chance of com-
pleting college, one-third as much chance of becoming a profes-
sional man, twice as much chance of becoming unemployed,
about one-seventh as much chance of earning $10,000 a year, a
life expectancy which is 7 years shorter, and the prospects of earn-
ing only half as much.
This is not a sectional issue. Difficulties over segregation and
discrimination exist in every city, in every State of the Union, pro-
ducing in many cities a rising tide of discontent that threatens the
public safety. Nor is this a partisan issue. In a time of domestic cri-
sis men of good will and generosity should be able to unite re-
gardless of party or politics. This is not even a legal or legislative
issue alone. It is better to settle these matters in the courts than on
the streets, and new laws are needed at every level, but law alone
cannot make men see right.
We are confronted primarily with a moral issue. It is as old as
the scriptures and is as clear as the American Constitution.
The heart of the question is whether all Americans are to be af-
forded equal rights and equal opportunities, whether we are going
to treat our fellow Americans as we want to be treated. If an Amer-
ican, because his skin is dark, cannot eat lunch in a restaurant open
to the public, if he cannot send his children to the best public
school available, if he cannot vote for the public officials who rep-
resent him, if, in short, he cannot enjoy the full and free life which
all of us want, then who among us would be content to have the
color of his skin changed and stand in his place? Who among us
would then be content with the counsels of patience and delay?
One hundred years of delay have passed since President Lincoln
freed the slaves, yet their heirs, their grandsons, are not fully free.
They are not yet freed from the bonds of injustice. They are not
yet freed from social and economic oppression. And this Nation,
for all its hopes and all its boasts, will not be fully free until all its
citizens are free.
We preach freedom around the world, and we mean it, and we

cherish our freedom here at home, but are we to say to the world,
and much more importantly, to each other that this is a land of
the free except for the Negroes; that we have no second-class cit-
izens except Negroes; that we have no class or caste system, no
ghettoes, no master race except with respect to Negroes?
The Nation’s Promise

Now the time has come for this Nation to fulfill its promise. The
events in Birmingham and elsewhere have so increased the cries
for equality that no city or State or legislative body can prudently
choose to ignore them.
The fires of frustration and discord are burning in every city,
North and South, where legal remedies are not at hand. Redress
is sought in the streets, in demonstrations, parades, and protests
which create tensions and threaten violence and threaten lives.
We face, therefore, a moral crisis as a country and as a people. It
cannot be met by repressive police action. It cannot be left to in-
creased demonstrations in the streets. It cannot be quieted by to-
ken moves or talk. It is a time to act in the Congress, in your State
and local legislative body and, above all, in all of our daily lives.
It is not enough to pin the blame on others, to say this is a prob-
lem of one section of the country or another, or deplore the fact
that we face. A great change is at hand, and our task, our obliga-
tion, is to make that revolution, that change, peaceful and con-
structive for all.
Those who do nothing are inviting shame as well as violence.
Those who act boldly are recognizing right as well as reality.
Next week I shall ask the Congress of the United States to act,
to make a commitment it has not fully made in this century to the
proposition that race has no place in American life or law. The
Federal judiciary has upheld that proposition in a series of
forthright cases. The executive branch has adopted that proposi-
tion in the conduct of its affairs, including the employment of
Federal personnel, the use of Federal facilities, and the sale of fed-
erally financed housing.
But there are other necessary measures which only the Congress
can provide, and they must be provided at this session. The old
code of equity law under which we live commands for every

wrong a remedy, but in too many communities, in too many parts
of the country, wrongs are inflicted on Negro citizens and there
are no remedies at law. Unless the Congress acts, their only rem-
edy is in the street.
A Call for Legislation

I am, therefore, asking the Congress to enact legislation giving all
Americans the right to be served in facilities which are open to the
public—hotels, restaurants, theaters, retail stores, and similar es-
tablishments.
This seems to me to be an elementary right. Its denial is an ar-
bitrary indignity that no American in 1963 should have to endure,
but many do.
I have recently met with scores of business leaders urging them
to take voluntary action to end this discrimination and I have
been encouraged by their response, and in the last two weeks over
75 cities have seen progress made in desegregating these kinds of
facilities. But many are unwilling to act alone, and for this reason,
nationwide legislation is needed if we are to move this problem
from the streets to the courts.
I am also asking Congress to authorize the Federal Government
in participate more fully in lawsuits designed to end segregation
in public education. We have succeeded in persuading many dis-
tricts to desegregate voluntarily. Dozens have admitted Negroes
without violence. Today a Negro is attending a State-supported
institution in every one of our 50 States, but the pace is very slow.
Too many Negro children entering segregated grade schools at
the time of the Supreme Court’s decision 9 years ago will enter
segregated high schools this fall, having suffered a loss which can
never be restored. The lack of an adequate education denies the
Negro a chance to get a decent job.
The orderly implementation of the Supreme Court decision,
therefore, cannot be left solely to those who may not have the eco-
nomic resources to carry the legal action or who may be subject
to harassment.
Other features will be also requested, including greater protec-
tion for the right to vote. But legislation, I repeat, cannot solve this
problem alone. It must be solved in the homes of every American

in every community across our country.
Praising Civil Rights Workers

In this respect, I want to pay tribute to those citizens North and
South who have been working in their communities to make life
better for all. They are acting not out of a sense of legal duty but
out of a sense of human decency.
Like our soldiers and sailors in all parts of the world they are
meeting freedom’s challenge on the firing line, and I salute them
for their honor and their courage.
My fellow Americans, this is a problem which faces us all—in
every city of the North as well as the South. Today there are Ne-
groes unemployed, two or three times as many compared to
whites, inadequate in education, moving into the large cities, un-
able to find work, young people particularly out of work without
hope, denied equal rights, denied the opportunity to eat at a
restaurant or lunch counter or go to a movie theater, denied the
right to a decent education, denied almost today the right to at-
tend a State university even though qualified. It seems to me that
these are matters which concern us all, not merely Presidents or
Congressmen or Governors, but every citizen of the United States.
This is one country. It has become one country because all of us
and all the people who came here had an equal chance to develop
their talents.
We cannot say to 10 percent of the population that you can’t
have that right; that your children can’t have the chance to develop
whatever talents they have; that the only way that they are going to
get their rights is to go into the streets and demonstrate. I think we
owe them and we owe ourselves a better country than that.
Therefore, I am asking for your help in making it easier for us
to move ahead and to provide the kind of equality of treatment
which we would want ourselves; to give a chance for every child
to be educated to the limit of his talents.
As I have said before, not every child has an equal talent or an
equal ability or an equal motivation, but they should have the
equal right to develop their talent and their ability and their mo-
tivation, to make something of themselves.
We have a right to expect that the Negro community will be re-

sponsible, will uphold the law, but they have a right to expect that
the law will be fair, that the Constitution will be color blind, as
Justice [John] Harlan said at the turn of the century.
This is what we are talking about and this is a matter which con-
cerns this country and what it stands for, and in meeting it I ask
the support of all our citizens.
Thank you very much.
Viewpoint 2
“We can rely upon none but ourselves as a catalyst
in the development of the potential power of the
black community.”
Federal Civil Rights

Legislation Is
Inadequate
James Farmer
The Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) was founded in 1942
to challenge segregation and discrimination through nonviolent
resistance at restaurants, waiting rooms, and other public areas.
Despite its pacifist origins, however, CORE evolved with the po-
litical climate: As the quest for black rights intensified in the six-
ties, CORE, under the leadership of Executive Director James
Farmer, began to abandon its long-held belief in nonviolent
protest and promote a more militant, separatist agenda.
The following is excerpted from Farmer’s report on civil
rights to the 1965 CORE Convention. For Farmer, the key to
enhanced civil rights is not federal legislation or governmental
programs. Farmer calls the Civil Rights Acts of 1957, 1960, and
1964, for example, only marginally effective as a tool for the ac-
quisition of greater equality—and certainly not a panacea for
the racial ills plaguing the country. Rather, Farmer advocates a
James Farmer, annual report to the CORE Convention, July 1, 1965.
128
strategy whereby blacks harness their group power through in-

dependent political action and community organization.
A s CORE meets at its 23rd Annual Convention, we have be-

hind us many successes achieved and victories won. But this
report will not be a recounting of past successes; to rest on one’s
laurels is to atrophy and die. Past victories—in public accommo-
dations, in voting rights, in the support of law and public policy—
have been in battles preceding the major encounter.
The major war now confronting us is aimed at harnessing the
awesome political potential of the black community in order to
effect basic social and economic changes for all Americans, to al-
ter meaningfully the lives of the Black Americans (our plight has
not been and will not be changed by past victories), and to bring
about a real equality of free men.
This job cannot be done for us by the Government. In the first
place, the establishments—Federal, State, and Local—have too
much built-in resistance to fundamental change. Any establish-
ment by definition seeks its own perpetuation and rejects that
which threatens it. For example, politicians take over and seek to
make the anti-poverty programs an adjunct of their political as-
pirations. They attack community action programs of the anti-
poverty war as being anti-city hall. School Boards, which have al-
ready lost the drop-outs and other under-privileged youth, reach
out greedily to control community education programs and see
that they do not shake up the school systems. Powerful lobbies,
such as the financial and the real estate interests, exert tremendous
pressure to see that programs to relieve poverty do not threaten
their interests.
Further, it is impossible for the Government to mount a deci-
sive war against poverty and bigotry in the United States while it
is pouring billions down the drain in a war against people in Viet
Nam. The billion dollars available to fight poverty is puny com-
pared with the need and insignificant compared with the re-
sources expended in wars.
Thus, we must be constructive critics of the anti-poverty pro-
gram, using its resources for our fight where we can, insisting that
local anti-poverty boards be truly representatives of the deprived

communities and the minorities which they are supposed to help,
and attacking waste and pork-barreling wherever it occurs.
Yet it would be fatal to think that the anti-poverty program
alone can make the necessary changes in the social and economic
life of Black Americans. It can be no more a solution to our prob-
lems than the Civil Rights Acts of 1957, 1960, 1964 were, or the
Voter Rights Act of 1965 will be. Like those laws, the anti-poverty
program has to be seen as no more than a tool, useful at times but
inadequate at best to do the job.
We can rely upon none but ourselves as a catalyst in the devel-
opment of the potential power of the black community in its own
behalf and in behalf of the nation. CORE alone has the nation-
wide network of militant chapters required, unshackled by com-
promising entanglements, political commitments and alliances.
CORE alone has the flexibility to move in the new directions de-
manded by this phase of the war, while it fulfills its commitments
to the unfinished tasks of the last phase.
In this new phase of our war to change the life of the Negro in
a changed America, there are two aspects: Community organiza-
tion and Political organization. It must be clearly seen that nei-
ther aspect is an end in itself. Community organization, includ-
ing social services, for its own sake is mere social uplift and has no
basic importance in changing the life role of the Negro. Political
organization for its own sake is sheer opportunism. While both
aspects must be undertaken simultaneously, the first, community
organization, may be seen as a step to increase the effectiveness of
the second, political organization. Or another way of viewing it,
is to see community organization as a tool—a tool to build a ve-
hicle. Political organization, then, is the vehicle to take us to the
desired objective. That objective is an open society free of race dis-
crimination and forced segregation, shorn of poverty and unem-
ployment, with decent housing and high-quality education for all.
The objective, in a word, is a new society, a free and open society.
Community Organizations
The term, community organization, has become almost a cliché.
The need now is to put content into that cliché. For two years,
community organization has been widely discussed within CORE.

For many, the discussion of it has been a substitute for taking con-
crete steps to achieve it. Many CORE Chapters, however, have
moved their offices into the heart of the black ghetto and have
made a serious attempt at ghetto involvement and community or-
ganization. If we are honest we will admit that most have failed,
though a few have had small successes at organizing their com-
munity. Thus the impact of some of our chapters has dwindled.
So now, here we stand, faltering for a necessary transition. If the
need for community organization has been great in the past, it is
now, I believe, desperate. It is now or never. CORE’s survival as a
viable and relevant organization depends upon it. . . .
Before a community can be organized in a way that is mean-
ingful to the community, we must engage in a dialogue with that
community. The indigenous people of a community know their
hurts, their needs and their problems far better than we. We must
encourage the community to speak, for it has much to say. And
we must be prepared to listen. Yet we must not be afraid to talk
to the community, for we, too, have something of importance to
say growing out of our experience in the movement. The deci-
sions, however, must rest with the people of a community or a
neighborhood, for it is their lives to be fulfilled, their dreams to
be realized. . . .
Political Organization and Action

It is clear that the objectives we seek—in the wiping out of poverty
and unemployment, elimination of bad housing, city planning for
integration in housing and schools, quality education—are polit-
ical objectives depending upon responses we can exact from po-
litical machinery. We can no longer rely on pressuring and cajol-
ing political units toward desired actions. We must be in a
position of power, a position to change those political units when
they are not responsive.
The only way to achieve political objectives is through power,
political power. Only diminishing returns can be achieved
through the pressure of demonstrations not backed up by politi-
cal muscle.
We have won amazing successes without political muscle. The
New York City CORE chapters came out against [Emile] Wagner
[leader of the staunchly segregationist White Citizens’ Council in
New Orleans] and the National Director backed them up, and we
toppled a Police Commissioner and a Mayor. Now, everyone is a
candidate for Mayor and bidding for CORE support. This does
not indicate strength. It merely shows what CORE can accomplish
in spite of weakness, and thus how much more could be done if
we had the political power which can derive from community or-
ganization and political organization. . . .
As we organize the community through directed centers, so we
must seek to organize the community politically—or, more ac-
curately, to reorganize it politically. For the bosses and the ma-
chines have already organized it after a fashion with their ward
heelers and their petty precinct captains. The greatest tragedy of
all would be for the existing black vote to remain in, and the new
black vote to be dumped into the general political soup now
brewed by the machine bosses—black or white.
What is needed, I believe, is independent political action
through indigenous political organizations. This is the Freedom
Democratic Party in Mississippi and CORE is supporting it fully,
including its challenge. After the Summer CORE Project in
Louisiana, if activated communities articulate the desire we will
help them organize a Louisiana Freedom Democratic Party.
In the North, independent political voices are needed too.
When the black ghetto communities with which CORE chapters
have dialogued articulate the desire, we must take the lead in help-
ing them develop Freedom Democratic Movements to serve as a
political voice for their awakening self-expression.
Only through such independent action can the growing black
vote achieve maximum effectiveness in moving toward the goals
we seek. Freedom Democratic Movements must not be racist and
should not exclude whites. But their base must be in the black
ghetto, else they will be merely another exercise in liberal futility!
Viewpoint 3
“Nonviolence became more than a method to which
I gave intellectual assent; it became a commitment
to a way of life.”
Blacks Must Employ

Nonviolent
Resistance
Martin Luther King Jr.
A young black preacher named Martin Luther King Jr., took
center stage in the civil rights movement when he led the move-
ment to desegregate the city buses in Montgomery, Alabama, in
1955. In the wake of the boycott, King helped found the South-
ern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), a pacifist organi-
zation through which King mobilized thousands of demonstra-
tors to voice black grievances. His broad appeal to both whites
and blacks was based, in part, on his belief that well organized
and executed nonviolence could be a potent weapon against
racism, and that the racial divide could be breached only
through love.
Throughout his years on the civil rights front—as violent
confrontations erupted in Selma, Albany, Birmingham, and
other hot spots—King’s commitment to nonviolence would be
Martin Luther King Jr., Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story. New
York: Harper & Brothers, 1958. Copyright © 1963 by Martin Luther King Jr.,
copyright renewed 1991 by Coretta Scott King. Reproduced by arrangement
with the Estate of Martin Luther King Jr., c/o Writers House as agent for the
proprietor New York, NY.
133
seriously tested. Yet King remained a steadfast proponent of

passive resistance until his death, by assassination, in 1968. The
following is excerpted from Stride Toward Freedom, King’s ac-
count of the Montgomery bus boycott—and the positive role
of nonviolence.
W hen I went to Montgomery as a pastor, I had not the slight-

est idea that I would later become involved in a crisis in
which nonviolent resistance would be applicable. I neither started
the protest nor suggested it. I simply responded to the call of the
people for a spokesman. When the protest began, my mind, con-
sciously or unconsciously, was driven back to the Sermon on the
Mount, with its sublime teachings on love, and the Gandhian
method of nonviolent resistance. As the days unfolded, I came to
see the power of nonviolence more and more. Living through the
actual experience of the protest, nonviolence became more than
a method to which I gave intellectual assent; it became a com-
mitment to a way of life. Many of the things that I had not cleared
up intellectually concerning nonviolence were now solved in the
sphere of practical action.
The Tenets of Nonviolence

Since the philosophy of nonviolence played such a positive role in
the Montgomery Movement, it may be wise to turn to a brief dis-
cussion of some basic aspects of this philosophy.
First, it must be emphasized that nonviolent resistance is not a
method for cowards; it does resist. If one uses this method because
he is afraid or merely because he lacks the instruments of violence,
he is not truly nonviolent. This is why Gandhi often said that if
cowardice is the only alternative to violence, it is better to fight.
He made this statement conscious of the fact that there is always
another alternative: no individual or group need submit to any
wrong, nor need they use violence to right the wrong; there is the
way of nonviolence resistance. This is ultimately the way of the
strong man. It is not a method of stagnant passivity. The phrase
“passive resistance” often gives the false impression that this is a
sort of “do-nothing method” in which the resister quietly and pas-
sively accepts evil. But nothing is further from the truth. For while
the nonviolent resister is passive in the sense that he is not physi-
cally aggressive toward his opponent, his mind and emotions are
always active, constantly seeking to persuade his opponent that he
is wrong. The method is passive physically, but strongly active
spiritually. It is not passive nonresistance to evil, it is active non-
violent resistance to evil.
A second basic fact that characterizes nonviolence is that it does
not seek to defeat or humiliate the opponent, but to win his
friendship and understanding. The nonviolent resister must of-
ten express his protest through noncooperation or boycotts, but
he realizes that these are not ends themselves; they are merely
means to awaken a sense of moral shame in the opponent. The
end is redemption and reconciliation. The aftermath of nonvio-
lence is the creation of the beloved community, while the after-
math of violence is tragic bitterness.
A third characteristic of this method is that the attack is directed
against forces of evil rather than against persons who happen to
be doing the evil. It is evil that the nonviolent resister seeks to de-
feat, not the persons victimized by evil. If he is opposing racial in-
justice, the nonviolent resister has the vision to see that the basic
tension is not between races. As I like to say to the people in
Montgomery: “The tension in this city is not between white
people and Negro people. The tension is, at bottom, between jus-
tice and injustice, between the forces of light and the forces of
darkness. And if there is a victory, it will be a victory not merely
for fifty thousand Negroes, but a victory for justice and the forces
of light. We are out to defeat injustice and not white persons who
may be unjust.”
A fourth point that characterizes nonviolent resistance is a will-
ingness to accept suffering without retaliation, to accept blows
from the opponent without striking back. “Rivers of blood may
have to flow before we gain our freedom, but it must be our
blood,” Gandhi said to his countrymen. The nonviolent resister
is willing to accept violence if necessary, but never to inflict it. He
does not seek to dodge jail. If going to jail is necessary, he enters
it “as a bridegroom enters the bride’s chamber.”
One may well ask: “What is the nonviolent resister’s justifica-
Martin Luther King Jr. addresses a crowd of civil rights demonstrators in 1965.
King encourages his followers to support nonviolent protest.
tion for this ordeal to which he invites men, for this mass politi-
cal application of the ancient doctrine of turning the other cheek?”
The answer is found in the realization that unearned suffering is
redemptive. Suffering, the nonviolent resister realizes, has tremen-
dous educational and transforming possibilities. “Things of fun-
damental importance to people are not secured by reason alone,
but have to be purchased with their suffering,” said Gandhi. He
continues: “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.”
A fifth point concerning nonviolent resistance is that it avoids
not only external physical violence but also internal violence of
spirit. The nonviolent resister not only refuses to shoot his oppo-
nent but he also refuses to hate him. At the center of nonviolence
stands the principle of love. The nonviolent resister would con-
tend that in the struggle for human dignity, the oppressed people
of the world must not succumb to the temptation of becoming
bitter or indulging in hate campaigns. To retaliate in kind would
do nothing but intensify the existence of hate in the universe.
Along the way of life, someone must have sense enough and
morality enough to cut off the chain of hate. This can only be
done by projecting the ethic of love to the center of our lives.
The Power of Love

In speaking of love at this point, we are not referring to some sen-
timental or affectionate emotion. It would be nonsense to urge
men to love their oppressors in an affectionate sense. Love in this
connection means understanding, redemptive good will. Here the
Greek language comes to our aid. There are three words for love
in the Greek New Testament. First, there is eros. In Platonic phi-
losophy eros meant the yearning of the soul for the realm of the
divine. It has come now to mean a sort of aesthetic or romantic
love. Second, there is philia which means intimate affection be-
tween personal friends. Philia denotes a sort of reciprocal love; the
person loves because he is loved. When we speak of loving those
who oppose us, we refer to neither eros nor philia; we speak of a
love which is expressed in the Greek word agape. Agape means un-
derstanding, redeeming good will for all men. It is an overflowing
love which is purely spontaneous, unmotivated, groundless, and
creative. It is not set in motion by any quality or function of its
object. It is the love of God operating in the human heart.
Agape is disinterested love. It is a love in which the individual
seeks not his own good, but the good of his neighbor (I Cor. 10:24).
Agape does not begin by discriminating between worthy and un-
worthy people, or any qualities people possess. It begins by loving
others for their sakes. It is an entirely “neighbor-regarding concern
for others,” which discovers the neighbor in every man it meets.
Therefore, agape makes no distinction between friend and enemy;
it is directed toward both. If one loves an individual merely on ac-
count of his friendliness, he loves him for the sake of the benefits
to be gained from the friendship, rather than for the friend’s own
sake. Consequently, the best way to assure oneself that Love is dis-
interested is to have love for the enemy-neighbor from whom you
can expect no good in return, but only hostility and persecution.

Another basic point about agape is that it springs from the need
of the other person—his need for belonging to the best in the hu-
man family. The Samaritan who helped the Jew on the Jericho
Road was “good” because he responded to the human need that
he was presented with. God’s love is eternal and fails not because
man needs his love. St. Paul assures us that the loving act of re-
demption was done “while we were yet sinners”—that is, at the
point of our greatest need for love. Since the white man’s person-
ality is greatly distorted by segregation, and his soul is greatly
scarred, he needs the love of the Negro. The Negro must love the
white man, because the white man needs his love to remove his
tensions, insecurities, and fears.
Agape is not a weak, passive love. It is love in action. Agape is
love seeking to preserve and create community. It is insistence on
community even when one seeks to break it. Agape is a willing-
ness to sacrifice in the interest of mutuality. Agape is a willingness
to go to any length to restore community. It doesn’t stop at the
first mile, but it goes the second mile to restore community. It is
a willingness to forgive, not seven times, but seventy times seven
to restore community. The cross is the eternal expression of the
length to which God will go in order to restore broken commu-
nity. The resurrection is a symbol of God’s triumph over all the
forces that seek to block community. The Holy Spirit is the con-
tinuing community creating reality that moves through history.
He who works against community is working against the whole
of creation. Therefore, if I respond to hate with a reciprocal hate
I do nothing but intensify the cleavage in broken community. I
can only close the gap in broken community by meeting hate with
love. If I meet hate with hate, I become depersonalized, because
creation is so designed that my personality can only be fulfilled in
the context of community. Booker T. Washington was right: “Let
no man pull you so low as to make you hate him.” When he pulls
you that low he brings you to the point of working against com-
munity; he drags you to the point of defying creation, and thereby
becoming depersonalized.
In the final analysis, agape means a recognition of the fact that
all life is interrelated. All humanity is involved in a single process,
and all men are brothers. To the degree that I harm my brother,
no matter what he is doing to me, to that extent I am harming
myself. For example, white men often refuse federal aid to educa-
tion in order to avoid giving the Negro his rights; but because all
men are brothers they cannot deny Negro children without harm-
ing their own. They end, all efforts to the contrary, by hurting
themselves. Why is this? Because men are brothers. If you harm
me, you harm yourself.
Love, agape, is the only cement that can hold this broken com-
munity together. When I am commanded to love, I am com-
manded to restore community, to resist injustice, and to meet the
needs of my brothers.
Faith in One Future

A sixth basic fact about nonviolent resistance is that it is based on
the conviction that the universe is on the side of justice. Conse-
quently, the believer in nonviolence has deep faith in the future.
This faith is another reason why the nonviolent resister can accept
suffering without retaliation. For he knows that in his struggle for
justice he has cosmic companionship. It is true that there are de-
vout believers in nonviolence who find it difficult to believe in a
personal God. But even these persons believe in the existence of
some creative force that works for universal wholeness. Whether
we call it an unconscious process, an impersonal Brahman, or a
Personal Being of matchless power and infinite love, there is a cre-
ative force in this universe that works to bring the disconnected
aspects of reality into a harmonious whole.
Viewpoint 4
“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.”
Nonviolent
Resistance Is
Not Enough
Malcolm X
Following the initial gains and boundless expectations of the
early civil rights years, the mid-sixties gave rise to a growing fac-
tion of blacks frustrated with the slow pace of the movement.
Moreover, whereas early civil rights struggles targeted southern
racial practices, focus soon shifted to northern urban communi-
ties, where de facto segregation continued to affect housing, ed-
ucation, and employment opportunities. Police brutality, too,
was rampant.
The subsequent debate about solutions to the nation’s racial
problems brought new leaders to prominence, most notably Mal-
colm X. A charismatic and provocative speaker, Malcolm X, per-
haps more than any other civil rights leader, gave voice to the
black nationalist fervor which was emerging in northern commu-
nities. In 1964, Malcolm delivered the following speech in which
he advocates the use of any means necessary to secure black eco-
Malcolm X, “Address to a Meeting in New York, 1964,” Documentary History of

the Modern Civil Rights Movement, edited by Peter B. Levy. Westport, CT:
Greenwood Press, 1992. Copyright © 1992 by Peter B. Levy. All rights reserved.
Reproduced by permission of Greenwood Publishing Group, Westport, CT.
140
nomic and political independence from a crippling white power

structure. Malcolm X was assassinated the following year.
F riends and enemies, tonight I hope that we can have a little fire-
side chat with as few sparks as possible tossed around. Espe-
cially because of the very explosive condition that the world is in
today. Sometimes, when a person’s house is on fire and someone
comes in yelling fire, instead of the person who is awakened by the
yell being thankful, he makes the mistake of charging the one who
awakened him with having set the fire. I hope that this little con-
versation tonight about the black revolution won’t cause many of
you to accuse us of igniting it when you find it at your doorstep.
I’m still a Muslim, that is, my religion is still Islam. I still believe
that there is no god but Allah and that Mohammed is the apostle
of Allah. That just happens to be my personal religion. But in the
capacity which I am functioning in today, I have no intention of
mixing my religion with the problems of 22,000,000 black people
in this country. . . .
Black Nationalism
I’m still a Muslim, but I’m also a nationalist, meaning that my po-
litical philosophy is black nationalism, my economic philosophy
is black nationalism, my social philosophy is black nationalism.
And when I say that this philosophy is black nationalism, to me
this means that the political philosophy for black nationalism is
that which is designed to encourage our people, the black people,
to gain complete control over the politics and the politicians of
our own people.
Our economic philosophy is that we should gain economic con-
trol over the economy of our own community, the businesses and
the other things which create employment so that we can provide
jobs for our own people instead of having to picket and boycott
and beg someone else for a job.
And, in short, our social philosophy means that we feel that it
is time to get together among our own kind and eliminate the evils
that are destroying the moral fiber of our society, like drug ad-
diction, drunkenness, adultery that leads to an abundance of bas-
tard children, welfare problems. We believe that we should lift the

level or the standard of our own society to a higher level wherein
we will be satisfied and then not inclined toward pushing our-
selves into other societies where we are not wanted. . . .
Just as we can see that all over the world one of the main prob-
lems facing the West is race, likewise here in America today, most
of your Negro leaders as well as the whites agree that 1964 itself
appears to be one of the most explosive years yet in the history of
America on the racial front, on the racial scene. Not only is the
Marcus Garvey and the Universal Negro

Improvement Association
Long before leaders like Malcolm X or Stokely Carmichael rose to
the political fore, Marcus Garvey, and the Universal Negro Im-
provement Association that he founded in 1914, exhorted blacks
to take pride in their heritage and resist assimilation into main-
stream America. Garvey’s paramount goal, moreover, was the cre-
ation of a separate black nation, an idea that prefigured the black
nationalist movement that would come to prominence in the six-
ties. The following statement by Garvey is excerpted from The
Philosophy and Opinions of Marcus Garvey.
Generally the public is kept misinformed of the truth sur-
rounding new movements of reform. Very seldom, if ever, re-
formers get the truth told about them and their movements.
Because of this natural attitude, the Universal Negro Im-
provement Association has been greatly handicapped in its
work, causing thereby one of the most liberal and helpful hu-
man movements of the twentieth century to be held up to
ridicule by those who take pride in poking fun at anything not
already successfully established.
The white man of America has become the natural leader of
the world. He, because of his exalted position, is called upon
to help in all human efforts. From nations to individuals the
racial explosion probably to take place in America, but all of the

ingredients for this racial explosion in America to blossom into a
world-wide racial explosion present themselves right here in front
of us. America’s racial powder keg, in short, can actually fuse or
ignite a world-wide powder keg.
And whites in this country who are still complacent when they
see the possibilities of racial strife getting out of hand and you are
complacent simply because you think you outnumber the racial
minority in this country, what you have to bear in mind is wherein
appeal is made to him for aid in all things affecting humanity,

so, naturally, there can be no great mass movement or change
without first acquainting the leader on whose sympathy and
advice the world moves.
It is because of this, and more so because of a desire to be
Christian friends with the white race, why I explain the aims
and objects of the Universal Negro Improvement Association.
The Universal Negro Improvement Association was an or-
ganization among Negroes that was seeking to improve the
condition of the race, with the view of establishing a nation in
Africa where Negroes would be given the opportunity to de-
velop by themselves, without creating the hatred and ani-
mosity that now exist in countries of the white race through
Negroes rivaling them for the highest and best positions in
government, politics, society and industry. The organization
believes in the rights of all men, yellow, white and black. To
us, the white race has a right to the peaceful possession and
occupation of countries of its own and in like manner the yel-
low and black races have their rights. It is only by an honest
and liberal consideration of such rights can the world be
blessed with the peace that is sought by Christian teachers and
leaders.
Marcus Garvey, The Philosophy and Opinions of Marcus Garvey. New
York: Universal Publishing House, 1923.
you might outnumber us in this country, you don’t outnumber us

all over the earth.
Any kind of racial explosion that takes place in this country to-
day, in 1964, is not a racial explo-
sion that can be confined to the
shores of America. It is a racial ex-
plosion that can ignite the racial
powder keg that exists all over the
planet that we call the earth. Now
I think that nobody would dis-
agree that the dark masses of
Africa and Asia and Latin Amer-
ica are already seething with bit-
terness, animosity, hostility, un-
rest; and impatience with the
racial intolerance that they them-
selves have experienced at the
hands of the white West. Malcolm X
And just as they themselves have
the ingredients of hostility toward the West in general, here we also
have 22,000,000 African-Americans, black, brown, red, and yellow
people in this country who are also seething with bitterness and
impatience and hostility and animosity at the racial intolerance not
only of the white West but of white America in particular. . . .
1964 will be America’s hottest year; her hottest year yet; a year
of much racial violence and much racial bloodshed. But it won’t
be blood that’s going to flow only on one side. The new genera-
tion of black people that have grown up in this country during re-
cent years are already forming the opinion, and it’s just opinion,
that if there is to be bleeding, it should be reciprocal—bleeding
on both sides. . . .
So today, when the black man starts reaching out for what
America says are his rights, the black man feels that he is within
his rights—when he becomes the victim of brutality by those who
are depriving him of his rights—to do whatever necessary to pro-
tect himself. . . .
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.
The Lessons of History

If George Washington didn’t get independence for this country
nonviolently, and if Patrick Henry didn’t come up with a non-
violent statement, and you taught me to look upon them as pa-
triots and heroes, then it’s time for you to realize that I have stud-
ied your books well. . . .
Every time a black man gets ready to defend himself some Un-
cle Tom tries to tell us, how can you win? That’s Tom talking.
Don’t listen to him This is the first thing we hear: the odds are
against you. You’re dealing with black people who don’t care any-
thing about odds. . . .
Again I go back to the people who founded and secured the in-
dependence of this country from the colonial power of England.
. . . They didn’t care about the odds. . . .
Our people are becoming more politically mature. . . . The Ne-
gro can see that he holds the balance of power in this country po-
litically. It is he who puts in office the one who gets in office. Yet
when the Negro helps that person get in office the Negro gets
nothing in return. . . .
The present administration, the Democratic administration, has
been there for four years. Yet no meaningful legislation has been
passed by them that proposes to benefit black people in this coun-
try, despite the fact that in the House they have 267 Democrats
and only 177 Republicans. . . . In the Senate there are 67 Demo-
crats and only 33 Republicans. The Democrats control two thirds
of the government and it is the Negroes who put them in a posi-
tion to control the government. Yet they give the Negroes noth-
ing in return but a few handouts in the form of appointments that
are only used as window-dressing to make it appear that the prob-
lem is being solved.
No, something is wrong. And when these black people wake up
and find out for real the trickery and the treachery that has been
heaped upon us you are going to have revolution. And when I say
revolution I don’t mean that stuff they were talking about last year
about “We Shall Overcome.”. . .
And the only way without bloodshed that this [revolution] can
be brought about is that the black man has to be given full use of
the ballot in every one of the 50 states. But if the black man
doesn’t get the ballot, then you are going to be faced with another
man who forgets the ballot and starts using the bullet. . . .
So you have a people today who not only know what they want,
but also know what they are supposed to have. And they them-
selves are clearing the way for another generation that is coming
up that not only will know what it wants and know what it should
have, but also will be ready and willing to do whatever is necessary
to see what they should have materializes immediately. Thank you.
Viewpoint 5
“Our concern for black power addresses itself
directly to . . . the necessity to reclaim our history
and our identity.”
Blacks Should Strive

for Black Power
Stokely Carmichael
The civil rights movement entered a new phase in the later part of
the 1960s, when “black power” became the rallying cry of black
militant groups across the country. Leading this new movement
was Stokely Carmichael, the fiery young leader of the Student
Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Carmichael first
popularized black power—and ignited great controversy—when
he used the term in 1966 to encourage blacks to see themselves as
a power bloc. At the same time that black power buoyed the
hopes of black nationalists, however, it terrified many whites,
who viewed it as combative and antiwhite.
In the following article, which originally appeared in a 1966
SNCC publication, Carmichael endorses a black power program
to liberate blacks from political, cultural, and economic oppres-
sion. To this end, Carmichael exhorts blacks—heretofore de-
pendent on the dominant white society—to return to the ghetto
to organize and control their own communities.
In 1967 Carmichael left the SNCC, which had significantly
hardened its stance on racial matters under his leadership, to
Stokely Carmichael, “Toward Black Liberation,” The Massachusetts Review,

Autumn 1966.
147
join the Black Panthers. Shortly after, he moved to Guinea,

Africa, and adopted the name Kwame Ture to reflect his African
roots.
O ne of the most pointed illustrations of the need for Black

Power, as a positive and redemptive force in a society de-
generating into a form of totalitarianism, is to be made by exam-
ining the history of distortion that the concept has received in na-
tional media of publicity. In this “debate,” as in everything else
that affects our lives, Negroes are dependent on, and at the dis-
cretion of, forces and institutions within the white society which
have little interest in representing us honestly. Our experience
with the national press has been that where they have managed to
escape a meretricious special interest in “Git Whitey” sensation-
alism and race-war mongering, individual reporters and com-
mentators have been conditioned by the enveloping racism of the
society to the point where they are incapable even of objective ob-
servation and reporting of racial incidents, much less the analysis
of ideas. But this limitation of vision and perceptions is an in-
evitable consequence of the dictatorship of definition, interpreta-
tion and consciousness, along with the censorship of history that
the society has inflicted upon the Negro—and itself.
Our concern for black power addresses itself directly to this
problem, the necessity to reclaim our history and our identity
from the cultural terrorism and depredation of self-justifying
white guilt.
To do this we shall have to struggle for the right to create our
own terms through which to define ourselves and our relation-
ship to the society, and to have these terms recognized. This is the
first necessity of a free people, and the first right that any oppres-
sor must suspend. The white fathers of American racism knew
this—instinctively it seems—as is indicated by the continuous
record of the distortion and omission in their dealings with the
red and black men. In the same way that southern apologists for
the “Jim Crow” society have so obscured, muddied and misrep-
resented the record of the reconstruction period, until it is almost
impossible to tell what really happened, their contemporary coun-
terparts are busy doing the same thing with the recent history of
the civil rights movement.
In 1964, for example, the National Democratic Party, led by L.
B. Johnson and Hubert H. Humphrey, cynically undermined the
efforts of Mississippi’s Black population to achieve some degree
of political representation. Yet, whenever the events of that con-
vention are recalled by the press, one sees only that version fabri-
cated by the press agents of the Democratic Party. A year later the
House of Representatives in an even more vulgar display of polit-
ical racism made a mockery of the political rights of Mississippi’s
Negroes when it failed to unseat the Mississippi Delegation to the
House which had been elected through a process which method-
ically and systematically excluded over 450,000 voting-age Ne-
groes, almost one half of the total electorate of the state. When-
ever this event is mentioned in print it is in terms which leaves one
with the rather curious impression that somehow the oppressed
Negro people of Mississippi are at fault for confronting the Con-
gress with a situation in which they had no alternative but to en-
dorse Mississippi’s racist political practices.
I mention these two examples because, having been directly in-
volved in them, I can see very clearly the discrepancies between
what happened, and the versions that are finding their way into
general acceptance as a kind of popular mythology. Thus the vic-
timization of the Negro takes place in two phases—first it occurs
in fact and deed, then, and this is equally sinister, in the official
recording of those facts.
The “Black Power” program and concept which is being articu-
lated by SNCC, CORE, and a host of community organizations in the
ghettoes of the North and South has not escaped that process. The
white press had been busy articulating their own analyses, their own
interpretations, and criticisms of their own creations. For example,
while the press had given wide and sensational dissemination to at-
tacks made by figures in the Civil Rights movement—foremost
among which are Roy Wilkins of the NAACP [National Association
for the Advancement of Colored People] and Whitney Young of
the Urban League—and to the hysterical ranting about black
racism made by the political chameleon that now serves as Vice-
President, it has generally failed to give accounts of the reasonable
and productive dialogue which is taking place in the Negro com-

munity, and in certain important areas in the white religious and
intellectual community. A national committee of influential Negro
Churchmen affiliated with the National Council of Churches, de-
spite their obvious respectability and responsibility, had to resort
to a paid advertisement to articulate their position, while anyone
shouting the hysterical yappings of “Black Racism” got ample space.
Thus the American people have gotten at best a superficial and mis-
leading account of the very terms and tenor of this debate. . . .
Traditionally, for each new ethnic group, the route to social and
political integration into America’s pluralistic society, has been
through the organization of their own institutions with which to
represent their communal needs within the larger society. This is
simply stating what the advocates of black power are saying. The
strident outcry, particularly from the liberal community, that has
been evoked by this proposal can only be understood by examin-
ing the historic relationship between Negro and White power in
this country.
Blackness and Powerlessness

Negroes are defined by two forces, their blackness and their pow-
erlessness. There have been traditionally two communities in
America. The White community, which controlled and defined
the forms that all institutions within the society would take, and
the Negro community which has been excluded from participa-
tion in the power decisions that shaped the society, and has tra-
ditionally been dependent upon, and subservient to the White
community.
This has not been accidental. The history of every institution of
this society indicates that a major concern in the ordering and
structuring of the society has been the maintaining of the Negro
community in its condition of dependence and oppression. This
has not been on the level of individual acts of discrimination be-
tween individual whites against individual Negroes, but as total
acts by the White community against the Negro community. This
fact cannot be too strongly emphasized—that racist assumptions
of white superiority have been so deeply ingrained in the struc-
ture of the society that it infuses its entire functioning, and is so
much a part of the national subconscious that it is taken for

granted and is frequently not even recognized.
Let me give an example of the difference between individual
racism and institutionalized racism, and the society’s response to
both. When unidentified white terrorists bomb a Negro Church
and kill five children, that is an act of individual racism, widely
deplored by most segments of the society. But when in that same
city, Birmingham, Alabama, not five but 500 Negro babies die
each year because of a lack of proper food, shelter and medical fa-
cilities, and thousands more are destroyed and maimed physically,
emotionally and intellectually because of conditions of poverty
and deprivation in the ghetto, that is a function of institutional-
ized racism. But the society either pretends it doesn’t know of this
situation, or is incapable of doing anything meaningful about it.
And this resistance to doing anything meaningful about condi-
tions in that ghetto comes from the fact that the ghetto is itself a
product of a combination of forces and special interests in the
white community, and the groups that have access to the re-
sources and power to change that situation benefit, politically and
economically, from the existence of that ghetto.
It is more than a figure of speech to say that the Negro commu-
nity in America is the victim of white imperialism and colonial ex-
ploitation. This is in practical economic and political terms true.
There are over 20 million black people comprising ten percent of
this nation. They for the most part live in well-defined areas of the
country—in the shanty-towns and rural black belt areas of the
South, and increasingly in the slums of northern and western in-
dustrial cities. If one goes into any Negro community, whether it
be in Jackson, Miss., Cambridge, Md. or Harlem, N.Y., one will
find that the same combination of political, economic, and social
forces are at work. The people in the Negro community do not
control the resources of that community, its political decisions, its
law enforcement, its housing standards; and even the physical own-
ership of the land, houses, and stores lie outside that community.
White Power
It is white power that makes the laws, and it is violent white power
in the form of armed white cops that enforces those laws with
guns and nightsticks. The vast majority of Negroes in this coun-

try live in these captive communities and must endure these con-
ditions of oppression because, and only because, they are black and
powerless. I do not suppose that at any point the men who control
the power and resources of this country ever sat down and de-
signed these black enclaves, and formally articulated the terms of
their colonial and dependent status, as was done, for example, by
the Apartheid government of South Africa. Yet, one can not dis-
tinguish between one ghetto and another. As one moves from city
to city it is as though some malignant racist planning-unit had
done precisely this—designed each one from the same master
blueprint. And indeed, if the ghetto had been formally and delib-
erately planned, instead of growing spontaneously and inevitably
from the racist functioning of the various institutions that com-
bine to make the society, it would be somehow less frightening.
The situation would be less frightening because, if these ghettoes
were the result of design and conspiracy, one could understand
their similarity as being artificial and consciously imposed, rather
than the result of identical patterns of white racism which repeat
themselves in cities as distant as Boston and Birmingham. With-
out bothering to list the historic factors which contribute to this
pattern—economic exploitation, political impotence, discrimi-
nation in employment and education—one can see that to cor-
rect this pattern will require far-reaching changes in the basic
power-relationships and the ingrained social patterns within the
society. The question is, of course, what kinds of changes are nec-
essary, and how is it possible to bring them about?
In recent years the answer to these questions which has been
given by most articulate groups of Negroes and their white allies,
the “liberals” of all stripes, has been in terms of something called
“integration.” According to the advocates of integration, social
justice will be accomplished by “integrating the Negro into the
mainstream institutions of the society from which he has been tra-
ditionally excluded.” It is very significant that each time I have
heard this formulation it has been in terms of “the Negro,” the in-
dividual Negro, rather than in terms of the community.
This concept of integration had to be based on the assumption
that there was nothing of value in the Negro community and that
little of value could be created among Negroes, so the thing to do

was to siphon off the “acceptable” Negroes into the surrounding
middle-class white community. Thus the goal of the movement
for integration was simply to loosen up the restrictions barring
the entry of Negroes into the white community. Goals around
which the struggle took place, such as public accommodation,
open housing, job opportunity on the executive level (which is
easier to deal with than the problem of semi-skilled and blue col-
lar jobs which involve more far-reaching economic adjustments),
are quite simply middle-class goals, articulated by a tiny group of
Negroes who had middle-class aspirations. It is true that the stu-
dent demonstrations in the South during the early sixties, out of
which SNCC came, had a similar orientation. But while it is hardly
a concern of a black sharecropper, dishwasher, or welfare recipi-
ent whether a certain fifteen-dollar-a-day motel offers accom-
modations to Negroes, the overt symbols of white superiority and
the imposed limitations on the Negro community had to be de-
stroyed. Now, black people must look beyond these goals, to the
issue of collective power.
Such a limited class orientation was reflected not only in the
program and goals of the civil rights movement, but in its tactics
and organization. It is very significant that the two oldest and
most “respectable” civil rights organizations have constitutions
which specifically prohibit partisan political activity. CORE once
did, but changed that clause when it changed its orientation to-
ward black power. But this is perfectly understandable in terms of
the strategy and goals of the older organizations. The civil rights
movement saw its role as a kind of liaison between the powerful
white community and the dependent Negro one. The dependent
status of the black community apparently was unimportant
since—if the movement were successful—it was going to blend
into the white community anyway. We made no pretense of or-
ganizing and developing institutions of community power in the
Negro community, but appealed to the conscience of white insti-
tutions of power. The posture of the civil rights movement was
that of the dependent, the suppliant. The theory was that without
attempting to create any organized base of political strength itself,
the civil rights movement could, by forming coalitions with var-
ious “liberal” pressure organizations in the white community—

liberal reform clubs, labor unions, church groups, progressive
civic groups—and at times one or other of the major political par-
ties—influence national legislation and national social patterns.
A United Program
I think we all have seen the limitations of this approach. We have
repeatedly seen that political alliances based on appeals to con-
science and decency are chancy things, simply because institutions
and political organizations have no consciences outside their own
special interests. The political and social rights of Negroes have
been and always will be negotiable and expendable the moment
they conflict with the interests of our “allies.” If we do not learn
from history, we are doomed to repeat it, and that is precisely the
lesson of the Reconstruction. Black people were allowed to regis-
ter, vote and participate in politics because it was to the advantage
of powerful white allies to promote this. But this was the result of
white decision, and it was ended by other white men’s decision
before any political base powerful enough to challenge that deci-
sion could be established in the southern Negro community.
(Thus at this point in the struggle Negroes have no assurance—
save a kind of idiot optimism and faith in a society whose history
is one of racism—that if it were to become necessary, even the
painfully limited gains thrown to the civil rights movement by the
Congress will not be revoked as soon as a shift in political senti-
ments should occur.)
The major limitation of this approach was that it tended to
maintain the traditional dependence of Negroes, and of the move-
ment. We depended upon the good-will and support of various
groups within the white community whose interests were not al-
ways compatible with ours. To the extent that we depended on
the financial support of other groups, we were vulnerable to their
influence and domination.
Also the program that evolved out of this coalition was really
limited and inadequate in the long term and one which affected
only a small select group of Negroes. Its goal was to make the
white community accessible to “qualified” Negroes and presum-
ably each year a few more Negroes armed with their passport—a
couple of university degrees—would escape into middle-class

America and adopt the attitudes and life styles of that group; and
one day the Harlems and the Watts would stand empty, a tribute
to the success of integration. This is simply neither realistic nor
particularly desirable. You can integrate communities, but you as-
similate individuals. Even if such a program were possible its re-
sult would be, not to develop the black community as a functional
and honorable segment of the total society, with its own cultural
identity, life patterns, and institutions, but to abolish it—the final
solution to the Negro problem. Marx said that the working class
is the first class in history that ever wanted to abolish itself. If one
listens to some of our “moderate” Negro leaders it appears that
the American Negro is the first race that ever wished to abolish it-
self. The fact is that what must be abolished is not the black com-
munity, but the dependent colonial status that has been inflicted
upon it. The racial and cultural personality of the black commu-
nity must be preserved and the community must win its freedom
while preserving its cultural integrity. This is the essential differ-
ence between integration as it is currently practiced and the con-
cept of black power.
What has the movement for integration accomplished to date?
The Negro graduating from M.I.T. with a doctorate will have
better job opportunities available to him than to Lynda Bird
Johnson. But the rate of unemployment in the Negro commu-
nity is steadily increasing, while that in the white community de-
creases. More educated Negroes hold executive jobs in major
corporations and federal agencies than ever before, but the gap
between white income and Negro income has almost doubled in
the last twenty years. More suburban housing is available to Ne-
groes, but housing conditions in the ghetto are steadily declin-
ing. While the infant mortality rate of New York City is at its
lowest rate ever in the city’s history, the infant mortality rate of
Harlem is steadily climbing. There has been an organized na-
tional resistance to the Supreme Court’s order to integrate the
schools, and the federal government has not acted to enforce that
order. Less than fifteen percent of black children in the South at-
tend integrated schools; and Negro schools, which the vast ma-
jority of black children still attend, are increasingly decrepit,
over-crowded, under-staffed, inadequately equipped and funded.

This explains why the rate of school dropouts is increasing
among Negro teenagers, who then express their bitterness, hope-
lessness, and alienation by the only means they have—rebellion.
As long as people in the ghettoes of our large cities feel that they
are victims of the misuse of white power without any way to have
their needs represented—and these are frequently simple needs:
to get the welfare inspectors to stop kicking down your doors in
the middle of the night, the cops from beating your children, the
landlord to exterminate the vermin in your home, the city to col-
lect your garbage—we will continue to have riots. These are not
the products of “black power,” but of the absence of any organi-
zation capable of giving the community the power, the black
power, to deal with its problems.
SNCC proposes that it is now time for the black freedom move-
ment to stop pandering to the fears and anxieties of the white
middle class in the attempt to earn its “good-will,” and to return
to the ghetto to organize these communities to control themselves.
This organization must be attempted in northern and southern
urban areas as well as in the rural black belt counties of the South.
The chief antagonist to this organization is, in the South, the
overtly racist Democratic party, and in the North the equally cor-
rupt big city machines.
The standard argument presented against independent politi-
cal organization is “But you are only 10%.” I cannot see the rele-
vance of this observation, since no one is talking about taking over
the country, but taking control over our own communities.
The fact is that the Negro population, 10% or not, is very strate-
gically placed because—ironically—of segregation. What is also
true is that Negroes have never been able to utilize the full voting
potential of our numbers. Where we could vote, the case has al-
ways been that the white political machine stacks and gerryman-
ders the political subdivision in Negro neighborhoods so the true
voting strength is never reflected in political strength. Would any-
one looking at the distribution of political power in Manhattan,
ever think that Negroes represented 60% of the population there?
Just as often the effective political organization in Negro com-
munities is absorbed by tokenism and patronage—the time hon-
ored practice of “giving” certain offices to selected Negroes. The

machine thus creates a “little machine,” which is subordinate and
responsive to it, in the Negro community. These Negro political
“leaders” are really vote deliverers, more responsible to the white
machine and the white power structure, than to the community
they allegedly represent. Thus the white community is able to sub-
stitute patronage control for audacious black power in the Negro
community. This is precisely what Johnson tried to do even be-
fore the Voting Rights Act of 1966 was passed. The National Dem-
ocrats made it very clear that the measure was intended to regis-
ter Democrats, not Negroes. The President and top officials of the
Democratic Party called in almost 100 selected Negro “leaders”
from the Deep South. Nothing was said about changing the poli-
cies of the racist state parties, nothing was said about repudiating
such leadership figures as [James] Eastland and Ross Barnett in
Mississippi or George Wallace in Alabama. What was said was
simply “Go home and organize your people into the local Dem-
ocratic Party—then we’ll see about poverty money and appoint-
ments.” (Incidentally, for the most part the War on Poverty in the
South is controlled by local Democratic ward heelers—and out-
spoken racists who have used the program to change the form of
the Negroes’ dependence. People who were afraid to register for
fear of being thrown off the farm are now afraid to register for fear
of losing their Head-Start jobs.)
Black Community Power

We must organize black community power to end these abuses, and
to give the Negro community a chance to have its needs expressed.
A leadership which is truly “responsible”—not to the white press
and power structure, but to the community—must be developed.
Such leadership will recognize that its power lies in the unified and
collective strength of that community. This will make it difficult for
the white leadership group to conduct its dialogue with individuals
in terms of patronage and prestige, and will force them to talk to
the community’s representatives in terms of real power.
The single aspect of the black power program that has encoun-
tered most criticism is this concept of independent organization.
This is presented as third-partyism which has never worked, or a
withdrawal into black nationalism and isolationism. If such a pro-

gram is developed it will not have the effect of isolating the Negro
community but the reverse. When the Negro community is able
to control local office, and negotiate with other groups from a po-
sition of organized strength, the possibility of meaningful politi-
cal alliances on specific issues will be increased. That is a rule of
politics and there is no reason why it should not operate here. The
only difference is that we will have the power to define the terms
of these alliances.
The next question usually is, “So—can it work, can the ghettoes
in fact be organized?” The answer is that this organization must
be successful, because there are no viable alternatives—not the
War on Poverty, which was at its inception limited to dealing with
effects rather than causes, and has become simply another source
of machine patronage. And “Integration” is meaningful only to a
small chosen class within the community.
The revolution in agricultural technology in the South is dis-
placing the rural Negro community into northern urban areas.
Both Washington, D.C. and Newark, N.J. have Negro majorities.
One third of Philadelphia’s population of two million people is
black. “Inner city” in most major urban areas is already predom-
inantly Negro, and with the white rush to suburbia, Negroes will
in the next three decades control the heart of our great cities.
These areas can become either concentration camps with a bitter
and volatile population whose only power is the power to destroy,
or organized and powerful communities able to make construc-
tive contributions to the total society. Without the power to con-
trol their lives and their communities, without effective political
institutions through which to relate to the total society, these com-
munities will exist in a constant state of insurrection. This is a
choice that the country will have to make.
Viewpoint 6
“‘Black Power’ is a bitter retreat from the possibility
of the attainment of the goals of any serious racial
integration in America.”
Black Power Is
Ineffective
Kenneth Clark
The noted psychologist Kenneth Clark is most often remem-
bered for his contribution to the NAACP brief that led to the
historic 1954 ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court in Brown v.
Board of Education that outlawed school segregation. In the fol-
lowing address delivered in October 1967 before the convention
of the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History,
Clark addresses the failed promises of the civil rights revolu-
tion—and the subsequent rise of black power. In his analysis,
Clark concedes that black power does indeed exert a tremen-
dous psychological boost to frustrated and disillusioned blacks.
In the end, however, black power is pragmatically futile, as it
tends to subjugate rational thought and planning to “dogma-
tism and fanaticism.” Instead, blacks must find implementable
solutions to the overwhelming racial problems that continue to
plague American society.
Kenneth Clark, “The Present Dilemma of the Negro,” Journal of Negro History,
vol. LIII, January 1968, pp. 1–11. Copyright © 1968 by The Association for the
Study of African-American Life and History. Reproduced by permission.
159
T he “nuclear” irony of American history and the American so-

cial, political, and economic system is that the destiny of the
enslaved and disadvantaged Negro determines the destiny of the
nation. The fundamental fact around which all questions of na-
tional survival pivot is the fact of inherent racial inter-relatedness—
or integration, if you please—in spite of the persistent demands
and attempts to impose racial separatism. The problems of the
American Negro are problems of America. The conflicts, aspira-
tions, confusions, and doubts of Negro Americans are not merely
similar but are identical to those of white Americans. The Negro
need not yearn to be assimilated into American culture—he is and
determines American culture. In the face of rapid and at times
frightening historical, economic, political, technological, social,
and intellectual changes, the Negro remains the constant, and at
times irritating reality that is America. He remains the essential
psychological reality with which America must continuously seek
to come to terms—and in so doing is formed by.
The moral and ethical aspirations of America have been ac-
cepted totally by Negroes. The moral schizophrenia of America is
reflected most clearly in the status of Negroes, starting with slav-
ery and continuing to the contemporary ghettoes which blight the
powerful and affluent cities of our nation.
American Racism
The dilemmas of America are the dilemmas of Negro Americans.
One cannot, therefore, discuss the dilemmas of the contemporary
American Negro without at the same time becoming involved in
an analysis of the historical and psychological fabric of American
life. This is the thesis rcflecting the bias of a social psychologist—
a bias which might be rejected by more sophisticated historians,
political and economic theorists, or tougher minded social crit-
ics. I nonetheless base my thesis on the psychological premise that
the values, attitudes, and behavior of individual human beings and
groups of human beings are determined by the complex social-
ization process—that normal human beings are modifiable and
are determined by their environment and culture—and not by
any inherent, genetic or racial determinants.
Let us now be specific:
A basic dilemma of America is whether the Negro should be ac-

cepted and taken seriously as a human being and permitted the
rights and privileges accorded other human beings in our political
system. America has endured slave rebellions, developed an un-
derground railroad, fought one of the most bloody wars in human
history and is now undergoing a series of urban ghetto implosions
in the attempt to resolve this persistent bedeviling question.
The Negro’s form of this basic dilemma is whether to persist in
his insistence upon his unqualified rights as a human being with-
out regard to the risks or consequences—or whether to accom-
modate to the resistances by subtle or flagrant forms of withdrawal
from the fray. The general acceptance of slavery, the many psy-
chological adjustments and deflection of aggressive reactions to
subjugation, the varieties of back-to-Africa movements, the cults,
fads, and the recent series of riots in our ghettos are among the
many ways in which American Negroes have sought to deal with
this basic American dilemma.
The gnawing doubts of white Americans as to their status and
worth as human beings—the deep feelings of inferiority coming
out of the actual inferior status in the land of their origin in Eu-
rope—impelled American whites to develop and enforce social
and institutional arrangements designed to inflict upon Negroes
an inferior status in American life. This was necessary to bolster
the demanding status needs of whites. These needs were power-
ful enough to counteract the logic, the morality and the powerful
political ethics of the egalitarian and democratic rhetoric which is
also an important American reality. . . . American democratic
creed and ideals are not psychologically contradictory to Ameri-
can racism. In terms of dynamics and motivation of the insecure,
they are compatible.
The Dilemma of Black Americans

This critical American dilemma is reflectcd in Negroes not only
in terms of acceptance of the creeds and its promises literally, but
also in terms of deep doubts concerning the worth of self. The for-
mer aspect of the dilemma stems from the fact of general indoc-
trination which transcends even the barriers of racially segregated
schools and is reinforced by the development of the mass media
in the 20th century. The latter component of the Negro’s dilemma

arises out of the reality of the inferior status to which he has been
subjugated. The walls of segregation are not only humiliating—
but given this type of chronic humiliation there develops self
doubt, subtle and flagrant forms of self hatred, personal and group
frustrations, internalized hostility, aggressions, self denial or bom-
bast. Under these conditions the walls of segregation become pa-
thetically protective. Within them the subjugated individuals need
not meet the tests of free and open competition—need not expose
vulnerable egos to single standards of competence.
The anguish and resistance of anxious, self-doubting white seg-
regationists and the cautious timidity of striving middle class
whites with the psyche of affluent peasants are matched only by
the anxieties, doubts, and vacillation of vast numbers of Ne-
groes—working and middle class—as they stand at the threshold
of non-segregated society and are confronted by the tremendous
psychological challenges for which American history not only did
not prepare them but erected seemingly insurmountable barriers.
The demand for racial justice on the part of the American Negroes
is balanced by an almost equal psychological reality of the fear of
the removal of racial barriers.
Within this context—disturbing and painful, but I believe psy-
chologically valid—one can now attempt an analysis of the con-
temporary manifestations of the dilemma of America and the
dilemma of Negro Americans. The value of such an analysis will
be determined by whether it provides a basis for constructive, re-
alistic, democratic, and humane resolutions of some of the racial
and social problems which afflict America and threaten its survival.
In many disturbing ways the problems of race relations in
America today are similar to those of the post-Reconstruction pe-
riod of the late 19th century which continued and intensified
through World War I. This period, which Rayford Logan and
John Hope Franklin have described as the “nadir” of the Negro in
American life, came as a seemingly abrupt and certainly cruel re-
pudiation of the promises of Reconstruction for inclusion of the
Negro into the political and economic life of the nation. This was
a period:
—when the white crusaders for racial justice and democracy be-
came weary as the newly freed Negroes could no longer be

considered a purely Southern problem;
—when the aspirations for and movement of Negroes toward
justice and equality were curtailed and reversed by organized
violence and barbarity perpetrated against them;
—when, as a result of their abandonment and powerlessness,
the frustrations, bitterness and despair of Negroes increased
and displaced optimism and hope.
This period culminated in the institutionalization of rigid forms
of racism—the enactment and enforcement of laws requiring or
permitting racial discrimination and segregation in all aspects of
American life. This retrogression in racial democracy, in America
was imposed by white segregationists with the apathy, indiffer-
ence, or quiet acceptance of white liberals and moderates as nec-
essary accessories.
The parallel with the state of race relations in America today is
stark and frightening. The promises and optimism of the Second
Reconstruction, initiated by the pattern of litigation which re-
sulted in the Brown decision of 1954—which precipitated the high
morale mark of the successful boycotts and sit-ins, and which
reached its climax in the emotional catharsis of the 1963 March
on Washington—were also cruelly aborted by stepped-up vio-
lence against Negro and white civil rights workers in the resistant
Southern states and the related weariness, racial anxieties, and la-
tent racism of Northern whites which emerged under the guise of
“white backlash.”
“Black Power”
The hopes and beliefs of the Negro that racial equality and democ-
racy could be obtained through litigation, legislation, executive
action, and negotiation, and though strong alliances with various
white liberal groups, were supplanted by disillusionment, bitter-
ness, and anger which erupted under the anguished cry of “Black
Power” which pathetically sought to disguise the understandable
desperation and impotence with bombast and rhetoric.
A critical danger—and probably a difference without a prag-
matic distinction—between the determinants of retrogression in
the first post-Reconstruction period and the present is that
whereas the promises of racial progress were reversed in the 19th

century by the fanaticism, irrationality, and cruel strength of white
segregationists—the impending racial retrogression of today
might come about largely through self-hatred leading to the fa-
naticism, dogmatism, rigidity, and self-destructive cruelty of black
separatists. If this comes about, it will not be enough to excuse this
monstrous perpetuation of the lie of racism and postponement of
the goals of democracy and humanity by asserting that the frus-
trations and bitterness of the victimized Negro account for his
present irrationality and rigidity. A similar and equally valid psy-
chological explanation could be offered to explain the racial cru-
elties of desperate and miserable poor whites of the past and pre-
sent. Understanding is not acceptance.
White segregationists were able to inflict and perpetuate racial in-
justices upon Negroes because rational, sophisticated, and moder-
ate whites were silent in the face of barbarities. They permitted
themselves to be intimidated and bullied by white extremists until
they were morally and almost functionally indistinguishable from
their worst and most ignorant elements. A similar threat and
dilemma face the rational, thoughtful Negro today. If he permits
himself to be cowed into silence by unrealistic Negro racists, he will
be an active partner in fastening the yoke of impossible racial sepa-
ratism more tightly around the neck of America. He—you, through
your silence, will permit the difficult goals of a racially non-
segregated society to be lost by default. You would have given to
black racists what you, your fathers and grandfathers fought and
died to prevent giving to white racists. The victories which white seg-
regationists, in spite of all their material and political power, could
not have won for themselves, black separatists would have won for
them—and we through our silence would make this possible.
To prevent the repetition of the tragedy of racial retrogression
and a return to the “nadir” of race relations in America, we must
be realistic in our appraisal of the present state of race relations in
America. . . . We must analyze as tough-mindedly as possible the
dynamics and symptoms of our times if we are to develop effec-
tive and realistic remedies.
During the past few years it became excruciatingly clear for the
Negro that the more things changed the more they remained the
same—or worsened. The promises and hope for progress became

a relentless quagmire of words.
The drama of direct action, non-violent confrontation of the
more obvious signs of Southern racial injustice became trite, and
was not particularly relevant or effective in dealing with the per-
sistent, pervasive, and subtle problems of racism which afflicted
the Northern Negro. More appropriate and effective methods
have not yet been found to deal with Northern racism.
The guilt and indignation of some Northern whites against
Southern forms of racism turned into white backlash or mutism
when the Northern Negro began to take seriously the claims of
civil rights progress and sought some observable signs of them in
Northern cities.
The anguish and desperation of the Northern Negro have been
expressed in the latest series of ghetto eruptions which started in
the Harlem riot of the summer of 1964, reached a crescendo in
the Watts riot of 1965 and continued through the current series
of riots in Newark and Detroit of this past summer. Another sig-
nificant expression of the Northern Negro’s “no-win” fatalism is
found in the rise of the “Black Power” slogan and momentum
which skyrocketed at the time of the Meredith shooting in Mis-
sissippi in June of 1966 and continues as an obbligato to the
sounds of ghetto violence and futility.
“Black Power” and “White Backlash”

It is important to keep in mind the date (June, 1966) when the
“Black Power” slogan became nationally advertised—in order not
to be confused about the cause and effect relationship between
“Black Power” and “white backlash.”
Whatever may be its tactical, strategic, and rational shortcom-
ings and its ambiguity, “Black Power” did not cause “white back-
lash” . . . The existence of “white backlash,” the unwillingness of
whites to be serious in meeting the demands of Negroes for the
same rights and responsibilities granted as a matter of course to
all other Americans—including the newest refugee from Euro-
pean, Latin American, or Asiatic oppression—caused the out-
bursts of hysterical bitterness and random hostility inherent in the
cry of “Black Power.”
“Black Power” emerged as a response to the following facts:

—a recognition of the fact that the center of gravity of the civil
rights movement had moved to the Northern urban racial
ghettos where it was now immobilized by ambiguous inten-
sified white resistance to any meaningful change in the
predicament of Negroes;
—the recognition of the fact that successful litigation, strong
legislation, free access to public accommodations, open hous-
ing laws, strong pronouncements on the part of the Presi-
dent, governors or mayors, and even the right to vote or to
hold office were not relevant to the overriding fact that the
masses of Negroes were still confined to poverty and to the
dehumanizing conditions of the ghetto;
—and that in spite of the promises of a Great Society and the
activity of the war on poverty, the Negro’s children were still
doomed to criminally inferior schools and his youth and
males the victims of unemployment, underemployment and
stagnation.
“Black Power” is the cry of defiance of what its advocates have
come to see as the hoax of racial progress—of the cynicism of the
appeals to the Negro to be patient and to be lawful as his needs are
continually subordinated to more important national and inter-
national issues and to the needs, desires, and conveniences of
more privileged groups.
Whites, by virtue of their numerical, military, and economic su-
periority, reinforced by historical American racism which grants
higher status to whites by virtues of skin color alone, do have the
power to decide whether the future of Negroes—the Negro
masses, the Negro middle class, or the Negro elected official—will
be positive, negative, or stagnant.
This core reality of the dynamics of power is not likely to be in-
fluenced by sentimental and idealistic appeals for justice, by smiles
or promises or by emotional sloganeering.
The Psychological Appeal of “Black Power”

“Black Power,” in spite of its ambiguity, its “no-win” premise, its
programmatic emptiness and its pragmatic futility does have
tremendous psychological appeal for the masses of Negroes who
have “nothing to lose” and stone middle class Negroes who are
revolted by the empty promises and the moral dry-rot of affluent
America.
“Black Power” is a bitter retreat from the possibility of the at-
tainment of the goals of any serious racial integration in Amer-
ica. . . .
It is an attempt to make a verbal virtue of involuntary racial seg-
regation. . . .
It is the sour grapes phenomenon on the American racial
scene. . . .
“Black Power” is the contemporary form of the Booker T.
Washington accommodation to white America’s resistance to
making democracy real for Negro Americans. While Booker T.
made his adjustment to and acceptance of white racism under the
guise of conservatism, many if not all of the “Black Power” advo-
cates are seeking to sell the same shoddy moral product in the
gaudy package of racial militance.
Nonetheless, today “Black Power” is a reality in the Negro ghet-
tos of America—increasing in emotional intensity, if not in ra-
tional clarity. And we, if we are to be realistic, cannot afford to
pretend that it does not exist. Even in its most irrational and illu-
sory formulations—and particularly when it is presented as a
vague and incoherent basis upon which the deprived Negro can
project his own pathetic wishes for a pride and an assertiveness
which white America continues mockingly or piously to deny
him—“Black Power” is a powerful political reality which cannot
be ignored by realistic Negro or white political officials.
It is all too clear that among the casualties of the present phase
of American race relations are reason, clarity, consistency and re-
alism. Some “Black Power” spokesmen, like their white segrega-
tionist counterparts, demand the subjugation of rational and re-
alistic thought and planning to dogmaticism and fanaticism. By
their threats and name calling, they seek to intimidate others into
silence or a mindless mouthing of their slogans.
To be effective and to increase his chances of survival in the face
of name-calling verbal racial militants, the trained Negro must
demonstrate that he is concerned and can bring about some pos-
itive changes in the following intolerable areas of ghetto life:
1. criminally inefficient and racially segregated public schools;

2. dehumanizingly poor housing;
3. pervasive job discrimination and joblessness;
4. shoddy quality of goods and high prices in local stores;
5. the dirt, filth, and stultifying drabness of ghetto streets and
neighborhoods;
6. the adversary relationship between police and the residents
of the ghettos.
This requires the mobilization and use of human intelligence to
define the problems, to study and analyze them and to develop
practical and implementable solutions to them. This cannot be
done on the basis of race—whites and Negroes must join together
in an experiment to determine whether systematic and emphatic
use of human intelligence and training can be a form of power
which can be used constructively in the quest for solutions of long
standing urban and racial problems. This is the rationale of The
Metropolitan Applied Research Center. We are under no illusions
that this will be easy. . . . We know that power confrontation
brings risks not found in the cloistered halls of academia. We
know that we cannot expect the protections and safety of the de-
tached isolated scholars. But we believe that human intelligence
is a social trust and that the stakes are worth the risks.
Viewpoint 7
“King’s nonviolent tactics could not have destroyed
the South’s racial system.”
King’s Protest
Campaigns Had a
Limited Impact on
Civil Rights
Denton L. Watson
Denton L. Watson charges that Martin Luther King Jr. and his
nonviolent direct action campaign played a limited role in the
civil rights movement. In truth, the NAACP was the real van-
guard of the movement. Watson uses the Montgomery bus boy-
cott as a case in point: Although it publicized black demands,
the boycott would not have been successful without the legal
backing of the NAACP. Indeed, throughout the pivotal years of
the civil rights movement, the NAACP created meaningful legis-
lation and protected the constitutional rights of blacks, which,
in turn, profoundly altered the social, economic, and political
conditions that affected African Americans. Watson is the au-
thor of Lion in the Lobby: Clarence Mitchell Jr.’s Struggle for the
Denton L. Watson, “Did King Scholars Skew Our Views of Civil Rights?”
The Chronicle of Higher Education, vol. 37, January 23, 1991, p. A44. Copy-
right © 1991 by The Chronicle of Higher Education. This article may not be
published, reposted, or redistributed without express permission from The
Chronicle. Reproduced by permission of the author.
169
Passage of Civil Rights Laws. He contributed the following article

to the Chronicle of Higher Education.
G iven the extent to which scholars have rewritten history by

making Martin Luther King, Jr., the pivotal figure in the civil
rights struggle, few of those now criticizing him for plagiarism are
qualified to cast the first stone. His admirers have built him up to
the point where it is easy to knock him down. Scholars have not
looked objectively at his whole personality and have credited him
with accomplishments of others; they must recognize that King’s
strategies had serious weaknesses, his aura of greatness was wan-
ing later in the movement, and his assassination contributed
greatly to his stature.
The Front Lines

Among others, people who worked with the Student Nonviolent
Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the Congress of Racial
Equality (CORE) say King wasn’t the only leader confronting
racial oppression in the South. They, too, were on the front lines.
During the struggle, the consensus was that the now-almost-
forgotten Roy Wilkins and the National Association for the Ad-
vancement of Colored People (NAACP) that he headed were the
vanguard of the movement.
And A. Philip Randolph, head of the Brotherhood of Sleeping
Car Porters, was the acknowledged “dean” of the movement.
From well before he got Franklin Roosevelt to create the Fair Em-
ployment Practice Committee in 1941, he was a driving force for
black equality. The FEPC begins the modern civil rights move-
ment; it is the first time a U.S. President acted to directly prohibit
racial discrimination.
Further, it was Clarence Mitchell, Jr., head of the NAACP
Washington Bureau, who led the struggle to pass civil rights
laws—the movement’s primary goal after the U.S. Supreme
Court’s 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education outlawing
school segregation. Scholars have not paid enough attention to
the NAACP and its leaders or understood basic differences be-
tween King’s goals and the organization’s. The struggle’s basic
thrusts were constitutional and political, despite King’s emphasis

on appeals to morality.
King’s nonviolent tactics could not have destroyed the South’s
racial system. It was the NAACP that breathed new life into the
Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments through the courts and
executed legislative strategies that led to passage in 1957 of the first
civil rights law in 82 years, paving the way for all subsequent leg-
islation of the period.
King’s Weaknesses
No one was more aware than King of his own weaknesses or of
the differences between his strategies and those of the NAACP.
King saw the struggle as a “three-lane road with some emphasiz-
ing the way of litigation and mobilizing forces for meaningful leg-
islation, and others emphasizing the way of nonviolent direct ac-
tion, and still others [like the National Urban League] moving
through research and education and building up forces to prepare
the Negro for the challenges of a highly industrialized society.”
The nonviolent direct action King was advocating, he explained,
“does not minimize works through the courts. But it recognizes
that legislation and court orders can only declare rights; they can
never thoroughly deliver them. Only when the people themselves
begin to act are rights on paper given life blood. A catalyst is
needed to breathe life experiences into a judicial decision by the
persistent exercise of the rights until they become usual and ordi-
nary in human conduct.”
Mitchell, NAACP chief strategist, agreed. But he knew that the
laws first had to be enacted and that the courts had to uphold
them.
King was very human and quietly but intensely competitive.
Had scholars properly examined that, they would not have been
so shocked over charges of plagiarism. King tended to invade ar-
eas where CORE and SNCC had established bases. This often led
young activists in those groups to speak disparagingly of him as
“de lawd” and to challenge his focus on arousing the national con-
science, in contrast to goals such as voter-registration programs,
for example.
The Montgomery, Alabama, bus boycott King led was an en-
during display of the dominance of the human spirit, but there

are real limits to human endurance, as evident from increasing
discouragement among boycotters shortly before the NAACP
won a ruling from the U.S. Supreme Court that segregation on
city buses was unconstitutional. Had the NAACP not stepped in,
the boycott would have failed. Yet, King downplayed the extent
to which the success of the bus boycott depended on NAACP le-
gal machinery, and scholars have followed suit.
King’s egotistical weakness is also seen in his book, Why We
Can’t Wait, when he claimed that the “Negro Revolution” had
“struck” in 1963, that “nonviolent direct action proved that it
would win victories without losing wars, and so became the tri-
umphant tactic of the Negro Revolution of 1963.” In fact, 1963
was the climax of a long awakening African Americans that began
in the closing days of the New Deal, not a sudden, explosive tes-
tament to King’s nonviolent philosophy.
King claimed the bloody demonstrations in Birmingham, Al-
abama, had forced the Kennedy Administration to place “a strong
civil rights bill at the top of the congressional calendar.” That was
partly true. Cries of nonviolent demonstrators reeling from Po-
lice Commissioner Bull Connor’s fire hoses, police dogs, and night
sticks did pierce the ears of an obtuse Kennedy Administration.
But it took another barbarous act to move President Kennedy to
ask Congress for the strong civil rights bill needed. The assassina-
tion of NAACP Mississippi field secretary Medgar Evers forced
the President to move beyond expressing anger at the Birming-
ham violence.
King’s Contribution
King was indeed a catalyst and will always remain a monumental
figure in civil rights history. His greatest contribution was his abil-
ity to arouse the human spirit to unparalleled heights and to bur-
den the consciences of white liberals. Yet, the nonviolent demon-
strations had limited impact on the legislative struggle in
Congress, where reason, constitutional concerns, and political
weight—not moral appeals or emotionalism—mattered most.
Mitchell said the demonstrations could not have “changed
enough minds to do the whole job” and “didn’t have the slightest
effect” on lawmakers like the Chairman of the House Rules Com-

mittee. The legislation got through his committee, Mitchell said,
only “because we had the votes to outvote him.”
To be fair to King and the civil rights movement, scholars must
separate myth from reality through objective historical assess-
ments, doing more comprehensive analyses of the movement
from perspectives other than King’s. They need to study with
equal devotion the legislative thrusts led by Wilkins and Mitchell,
as well as contributions of constitutional giants like Charles
Hamilton Houston, who established the NAACP legal program;
of his protege, Thurgood Marshall; and of many gifted lawyers.
Scholars should demonstrate awareness that the civil rights rev-
olution, though led by blacks with support of while liberals, could
have been won only with the help of political conservatives.
Mitchell was as much indebted to Republican conservatives as he
was to Republican and Democratic civil rights standard bearers.
It was broad-based support of the struggle to protect the con-
stitutional rights of all citizens that made the civil rights revolu-
tion the most important period in U.S. history after the American
Revolution and the Civil War. It is time scholars began writing a
much fuller version of the movement.
Viewpoint 8
“Mass mobilization and local organization did the
most to transform the racial landscape of the
South.”
King’s Protest
Campaigns Bolstered
Civil Rights
Adam Mack
In the following viewpoint, Adam Mack writes that Martin
Luther King Jr.’s direct-action and mass mobilization cam-
paigns played a pivotal role in promoting positive racial change
during the civil rights movement. Specifically, King’s mass
protests against Jim Crow—in Birmingham and Selma, for ex-
ample—drew national attention to the cause of civil rights and
compelled the federal government to take decisive action. In
contrast, the NAACP’s legalistic approach was limited, primar-
ily because many of the legal rulings that pertained to civil rights
had little or no impact outside of the courtroom. For example,
many southern schools succumbed to massive white resistance
and remained segregated even after the Supreme Court man-
dated desegregation in Brown v. Board of Education. Mack is an
instructor at the University of South Carolina.
Adam Mack, “The Civil Rights Movement Was More than Just an Accretion
of Legal Precedents: It Was a Change in the Hearts and Minds of a People,
and It Is Best Understood as a Mass Action,” History in Dispute, Vol. 2:
American Social and Political Movements, 1945–2000: Pursuit of Liberty,
edited by Robert J. Allison. Detroit: St. James Press, 2000. Copyright © 2000
by The Gale Group, Inc. Reproduced by permission.
174
I n 1989 veteran activist Bob Moses wrote that the Civil Rights
movement was characterized by two distinct organizing tradi-
tions. The first was concerned with large-scale community mobi-
lization, generally for national goals, and was represented by fa-
miliar events such as the March on Washington and the protests
in Birmingham and Selma. The second tradition involved work at
the local level, focusing on grassroots organizing and development
of indigenous leadership. Representing departures from the legal-
istic strategy practiced by the National Association for the Ad-
vancement of Colored People (NAACP), these two organizing tra-
ditions were primarily responsible for the major changes brought
by the Civil Rights movement. Community mobilization prompted
the federal government to pass transformative civil-rights legisla-
tion that dismantled the system of legalized segregation in the
South, and grassroots organizing empowered black communities
by helping develop leaders and institutions to carry forth the strug-
gle for the long term. The Civil Rights movement was a collabora-
tive effort and legalistic activism made significant contributions to
its success, but mass mobilization and local organization did the
most to transform the racial landscape of the South.
The Legalistic Approach

There can be no doubt that legalistic activism furthered the civil-
rights cause. A key point is that for the first half of the twentieth
century racial segregation was entrenched in state law and, since
the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision, endorsed by the Supreme
Court. Victories won by the legal arm of the NAACP from the
1930s through the 1950s—which included judgments against the
white primary (1944), segregation in interstate travel (1946),
racially restrictive covenants (1948), separate graduate and pro-
fessional schools for blacks, and eventually segregation in all lev-
els of public education (1954)—thus made critical contributions
to the freedom struggle by undermining the legal structure of Jim
Crow in the South. At the same time, these victories put the
weight of the Constitution behind the emerging Civil Rights
movement, giving moral as well as legal credibility to its goals.
Nevertheless, the NAACP’s legalistic strategy was a limited in-
strument for racial change. As much as legal victories seemed to
promise the downfall of Jim Crow, court decisions were not self-
enforcing; without strong federal support, they could be evaded
relatively easily by Southern obstructionists. This situation became
painfully obvious in the aftermath of the court victories of the
1940s and 1950s. Although the Supreme Court removed a major
obstacle to African American disfranchisement by outlawing the
white primary, whites continued to keep blacks from the polls
through a combination of intimidation and technical devices such
as literacy tests. Moreover, the Court’s ruling against segregated
interstate travel was ignored in most of the South, and discrimi-
nation in housing and employment remained a fact of life. Per-
haps the best example of Southern racial intransigence was white
resistance to Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, the
1954 Supreme Court decision that declared segregation in public
schools unconstitutional. Although Brown had an immediate ef-
fect on school desegregation in parts of the Upper South, it had
essentially no impact in the Deep South, as whites mounted a
campaign of massive resistance to the ruling. While the NAACP
undertook the time-consuming business of filing desegregation
suits, obstructionists used violence, token integration plans, and
a host of creative legal devices to prevent implementation of the
Brown decision. Meanwhile, the federal government refused to
aggressively enforce the decision, enduring if not promoting
Southern defiance.
Only when African Americans mobilized for direct confronta-
tions with the Jim Crow system was the entire federal government
compelled to intervene to help make real changes in the South. By
the early 1960s, civil-rights proponents had learned that the best
way to force the federal government to take decisive action was to
create a crisis that drew national attention to the overt denial of
basic citizenship rights to African Americans. More than any other
civil-rights organization, Martin Luther King Jr.’s Southern Chris-
tian Leadership Conference (SCLC) succeeded in mobilizing black
communities for dramatic nonviolent protest campaigns that cap-
tured media attention, aroused public support, and prompted fed-
eral intervention, including the passage of civil-rights legislation.
This strategy was used most effectively in nonviolent direct-
action campaigns in Birmingham and Selma, Alabama. Both these
campaigns brought the brutality of white supremacy to light by

generating shocking scenes of local law enforcement using vio-
lence to suppress peaceful demonstrations. Appearing on the front
pages of national newspapers and on television, events in Bir-
mingham and Selma led to significant increases in public sympa-
thy for the movement and moved the ever hesitant officials in
Washington to take a stronger stand for civil rights. According to
Adam Fairclough in To Redeem the Soul of America: The Southern
Christian Leadership Conference and Martin Luther King, Jr.
(1987), the turbulent events of the Birmingham campaign and the
spinoff demonstrations that followed convinced the Kennedy ad-
ministration—which had been following a piecemeal civil-rights
policy—that racial crises would continue to occur in the South
unless the federal government took action by passing strong civil-
rights legislation. This decision, Fairclough argues, led John F.
Kennedy to introduce legislation that was eventually passed as the
Civil Rights Act of 1964, a measure that expanded the federal gov-
ernment’s power to challenge segregation in public accommoda-
tions. Two years after the Birmingham protests, SCLC launched
a campaign in Selma to address the problem of black disfran-
chisement, an issue not adequately addressed in the Civil Rights
Act. As Fairclough has pointed out, the public reaction to the sup-
pression of demonstrations in Selma energized the Johnson ad-
ministration’s efforts to produce a strong voting-rights law, in-
creased Congressional support for such legislation, and thus paved
the way for the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
The 1964–1965 federal civil-rights legislation was not a panacea
for problems facing African Americans in the South, but its sig-
nificance should not be underestimated. Unlike previous Supreme
Court decisions and earlier civil-rights laws, the 1964 Civil Rights
Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act included strong enforcement
measures and brought dramatic change to the South. Although
there was some resistance to the Civil Rights Act, within a rela-
tively short time after its passage, Jim Crow signs came down in
much of Dixie, and public accommodations were opened, in a le-
gal sense, to blacks. Described by Fairclough as the “crowning
achievement of the civil rights movement,” the Voting Rights Act
transformed the South’s political landscape. By providing new
methods of enforcement such as federal registrars and election ob-

servers, as well as the suspension of literacy and other voting tests,
the act streamlined the government’s ability to protect African
American voting rights. In the decade after its passage black voter
registration increased significantly (in Mississippi it leapt from 6.7
percent to 67.4 percent), more and more African Americans were
elected to public office, and unfavorable white candidates were
defeated. Although whites continued to hold the lion’s share of
regional political power, the growth in the black electorate ush-
ered in a new racial tone in southern politics as white politicians
openly courted black votes; visible political racism generally be-
came a thing of the past.
However, direct action alone did not engender the transforma-
tive civil-rights legislation of the mid 1960s. Indeed, part of the
credit must go to NAACP lobbyists who helped push the measures
through Congress. Similarly, while the NAACP did not fully em-
brace direct-action tactics, the protest campaigns of the mid 1960s
benefited from timely legal and financial aid from the association.
As King and other civil-rights proponents realized, the success of
the movement depended on the interplay of NAACP-style legal-
ism and direct action practiced by other groups; scholars should
think twice before separating the two approaches completely. As
King put it, “Direct action is not a substitute for work in the courts
and the halls of government. Bringing about passage of a new and
broad law by a city council, state legislature or the Congress, or
pleading cases before the courts of the land, does not eliminate
the necessity for bringing about the mass dramatization of injus-
tice in front of a city hall. Indeed, direct action and legal action
and complement one another; when skillfully employed, each be-
comes more effective.”
Grassroots Efforts
Of course, the movement would not have accomplished anything
without local people who took to the streets to challenge Jim Crow.
Yet for ordinary African Americans, the gains achieved through
direct-action protest went beyond the passage of strong civil-rights
legislation. The act of striking a blow for their own freedom—
something difficult to do when activism was focused in faraway
courtrooms—promoted a new sense of self-determination and

self-respect. Reflecting on the movement in the mid 1970s,
Franklin McCain, one of the four black students who started the
Greensboro, North Carolina, sit-in movement, described his feel-
ings after participating in his first demonstration: “If it’s possible
to know what it means to have your soul cleansed—I felt pretty
clean at that time. I probably felt better on that day than I’ve ever
felt in my life. Seems like lot of feelings of guilt or what-have-you
suddenly left me, and I felt as though I had gained my manhood,
so to speak, and not only gained it, but had developed quite a lot
of respect for it. Not Franklin McCain only as an individual, but I
felt as though the manhood of a number of other black persons had
been restored and had gotten some respect from just that one day.”
In recent years scholars have looked closely at how the move-
ment changed the lives of local people, turning their attention
from the familiar protest campaigns led by King and the SCLC to
the less-glamorous work of organizing at the grassroots level. Sus-
tained local organizing, these historians argue, wrought remark-
able change by empowering black communities through the cul-
tivation of indigenous leadership and the creation of institutions
to support movement activity for the long term. . . .
The Civil Rights movement did not end the problem of race in
America. It did, however, destroy the system of legalized segrega-
tion that imposed second-class citizenship on African Americans
in the South. Equally important, the movement empowered
blacks at the local level by helping indigenous leadership and
movement-related institutions take root. Only when the focus of
reform efforts shifted from a legalistic approach to a strategy based
on community mobilization and grassroots organizing did these
changes become possible. Court victories and legislative lobbying
helped effect change, but the real credit belongs to the activists
and ordinary people who confronted Jim Crow in the streets.
W E
S
IN WORLD HISTORY
CHAPTER 4
Who Played the

Most Important
Role in the
Civil Rights
Movement?
S
E
Chapter Preface
T he civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s radically al-

tered the social, political, and economic conditions that affect
all minorities in the United States. While the most conspicuous
change was the abolishment of restrictions that kept blacks sepa-
rated from whites, the freedoms gained extended into virtually ev-
ery sphere of life. Through countless legal and political battles,
African Americans increased the black franchise, gained the right
to acquire an equal education, to own property, to enjoy the pro-
tection of the law, and to participate in state and federal govern-
ment—in essence, to enjoy the rights and privileges once reserved
for white Americans only. Perhaps most importantly, the civil
rights movement laid bare forever the overwhelming barriers—
many of which continue to plague minorities today—to full
equality.
Because the civil rights movement lost momentum in the af-
termath of Martin Luther King’s assassination, many scholars
mark King’s passing in 1968 as the end of the movement. Yet this
watershed moment in history continues to be the subject of in-
tense scrutiny as scholars and historians attempt to answer ques-
tions and challenge assumptions about the movement. For ex-
ample, many scholars and observers consider the civil rights
movement as part of an ongoing struggle that had begun decades
earlier—since emancipated slaves sought to exercise the civil rights
promised to them at the end of the Civil War. What, then, cat-
alyzed the modern civil rights movement and why did it gather
strength in the 1950s and decline in the 1960s? Why did it become
more radical in its later years? How did the movement’s leaders
and participants—many with diverse strategies, tactics, and
goals—effect change?
In the ongoing debate concerning the origins, impact, and
legacy of the civil rights movement, many scholars have come to
understand the black struggle primarily as a political movement
encompassing the national organizations and federal officials that
wrought change through judicial and legislative efforts. Others
181
feel that this focal point is too narrow, charging that a compre-
hensive understanding of the movement must center on the local
communities and grassroots individuals and organizations that
constituted the backbone of the movement. The following selec-
tions address these two viewpoints as they examine the role of na-
tional leaders versus local initiatives. They represent, in small part,
the large body of contemporary scholarship that continues to ex-
plore new dimensions of the civil rights movement.
Viewpoint 1
“Given existing power relationships heavily
favoring whites, southern Blacks could not possibly
eliminate racial inequality without outside federal
assistance.”
National Leaders
Played the Most
Important Role
in the Civil Rights
Movement
Steven F. Lawson
As contemporary historians debate the many facets of the Amer-
ican civil rights movement—its origins and legacy, for exam-
ple—one line of scholarship has centered on the role of presi-
dents, lawmakers, and other national leaders in the creation of a
more equitable society. Among the leading scholars of civil rights
history is Steven F. Lawson, professor of history at Rutgers Uni-
versity. In Lawson’s view, the federal government—in tandem
with national organizations and leaders—played a crucial role in
the civil rights movement through the creation of decisive civil
Steven F. Lawson, “The View from the Nation,” Debating the Civil Rights
Movement, 1945–1968, Steven F. Lawson and Charles Payne. Lanham, MD:
Rowman & Littlefield, 1998. Copyright © 1998 by Rowman & Littlefield
Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission.
183
rights legislation and the defeat of state governments that im-

posed upon blacks a second-class status. In contrast, grassroots
movements, despite noble efforts, simply could not have over-
turned the insidious system of white supremacy without the
backing of national organizations and the federal government.
According to this “top-down” interpretation, as Lawson calls it,
large-scale events, such as the passage of civil rights acts, for ex-
ample, constitute the most substantive gains of the civil rights
revolution. Lawson is the author of several books on the civil
rights movement, including Debating the Civil Rights Movement,
1945–1968, from which the following viewpoint is excerpted.
I t is impossible to understand how Blacks achieved first-class cit-

izenship rights in the South without concentrating on what na-
tional leaders in Washington, D.C., did to influence the course of
events leading to the extension of racial equality. Powerful presi-
dents, congressional lawmakers, and members of the Supreme
Court provided the legal instruments to challenge racial segregation
and disfranchisement. Without their crucial support, the struggle
against white supremacy in the South still would have taken place
but would have lacked the power and authority to defeat state gov-
ernments intent on keeping Blacks in subservient positions.
Along with national officials, the fate of the civil rights move-
ment depended on the presence of national organizations. Groups
such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored
People (NAACP), founded in 1909, drew on financial resources
and legal talent from all over the country to press the case for
equal rights in Congress and the courts. In similar fashion, Dr.
Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership
Conference (SCLC), established in the mid-1950s, focused their
attention on spotlighting white southern racism before a national
audience to mobilize support for their side. Even if white Ameri-
cans outside the South had wanted to ignore the plight of south-
ern Blacks, NAACP lawyers and lobbyists, SCLC protesters, and
their like-minded allies made that choice impossible. They could
do what Black residents of local communities could not do alone:
turn the civil rights struggle into a national cause for concern and
WHO PLAYED THE MOST IMPORTANT ROLE ? 185
prod the federal government into throwing its considerable power

to overturn the entrenched system of white domination that had
prevailed for centuries in the South.
Historical accounts that center on the national state in Wash-
ington and the operations of national organizations take on a par-
ticular narrative. The story begins with World War II, which stim-
ulated Black protests against racism, and winds its way through the
presidencies of Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry S. Truman, Dwight
D. Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, and Lyndon B. Johnson. This pe-
riod witnessed significant presidential executive orders promul-
gating desegregation in the military and in housing, five pieces of
pioneering civil rights legislation, and landmark Supreme Court
rulings toppling segregationist practices and extending the right to
vote. The familiar geographical signposts of civil rights demon-
strations—Montgomery, Birmingham, Selma, Albany, Little
Rock—derive their greatest importance as places that molded the
critical national debate on ending racial discrimination.
Overall, a nuanced account of the Black freedom struggle re-
quires an interconnected approach. A balanced portrayal ac-
knowledges that Black activists had important internal resources
at their disposal, derived from religious, economic, educational,
and civic institutions, with which to make their demands. But it
does not belittle African-American creativity and determination to
conclude that given existing power relationships heavily favoring
whites, southern Blacks could not possibly eliminate racial in-
equality without outside federal assistance. Furthermore, Wash-
ington officials had to protect African Americans from intimida-
tion and violence to allow them to carry out their challenges to
discrimination. Without this room for maneuvering, civil rights
advocates would encounter insurmountable hurdles in confronting
white power.
At the same time, the federal government could shape the di-
rection of the struggle by choosing whether and when to respond
to Black protest and by deciding on whom to bestow its support
within Black communities. Although united around the struggle
against white supremacy, African Americans were not monolithic
in their outlook and held various shades of opinion on how best
to combat racial bias. By allocating precious resources and con-
ferring recognition on particular elements within local Black com-

munities, national leaders could accelerate or slow down the pace
of racial change. . . .
The Supreme Court and School
Desegregation
[In 1950], the National Association struck at Jim Crow in higher
education. Its chief counsel, Thurgood Marshall, argued that by
setting up dual law schools at the University of Texas and segre-
gated graduate facilities at the University of Oklahoma, these state
institutions, like those elsewhere in the South, had created separate
but not equal opportunities for African Americans. In Sweatt v.
Painter and McLaurin v. Board of Regents, the high tribunal agreed
and suggested that increased financial resources to upgrade Black
schools could not produce genuine equality, that Black students
would have to receive the chance to learn in an environment that
did not treat them as inferior. These decisions did not overturn
segregation squarely, but they did set the stage for the NAACP to
challenge the doctrine of separate but equal head-on in the field of
public school education, which would affect white and Black
southerners more profoundly than any other challenge thus far.
The assault on public school segregation highlights the crucial
role played by the federal government in pushing forward the
struggle for civil rights. Initiated by the NAACP and supported by
its local branches, the litigation to desegregate the schools culmi-
nated in Brown v. Board of Education, a series of five cases from
(Topeka) Kansas, South Carolina, Virginia, Delaware, and Wash-
ington, D.C. In 1954, the Supreme Court put to rest the legal fic-
tion that under a system of enforced racial separation Black stu-
dents could receive an equal education. Speaking for the high
tribunal, Chief Justice Earl Warren did not attack white suprem-
acy directly or castigate southerners for historically oppressing
African Americans. Rather, he argued that it was impossible for
Blacks to obtain the full benefits of an education under the sys-
tem of segregation. “We conclude,” he asserted, “that in the field
of public education the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ has no
place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.”
Although this case pertained solely to public schools, the unan-
imous Supreme Court justices infused the overall fight for civil
rights with constitutional legitimacy. They raised doubts about
the validity of segregation as a means of preserving white su-
premacy. Jim Crow did not automatically crumble, and many ob-
stacles remained; however, the highest federal court in the land
had raised a powerful voice on behalf of racial equality and given
Blacks hope that the national government was on their side. . . .
The Montgomery Bus Boycott

In Montgomery, Alabama, the “Cradle of the Confederacy,” a
number of Black groups were promoting voter registration and
planning challenges to discriminatory service on city buses. On
December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks, a middle-aged Black seamstress,
refused to vacate her seat for a white passenger who boarded the
bus on which she was riding home after a long day’s work. The ar-
rest of this mild-mannered woman sparked a one-year boycott of
the buses. A network of local organizations made this protest pos-
sible. Parks was an official of the Montgomery chapter of the
NAACP, and the president of her branch, E.D. Nixon, arranged
for her release from jail and called for a demonstration. The
Women’s Political Council, led by Jo Ann Gibson Robinson, a
college professor, then plotted strategy for a one-day boycott and
distributed thousands of flyers to alert people to the plan. They
recruited clergy to lend their churches for mass meetings and en-
courage their congregants to withhold patronage from the buses.
They also tapped a relatively new minister in town, the twenty-
six-year-old Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., to head the Mont-
gomery Improvement Association, the coalition established to co-
ordinate the protest.
The year-long campaign showed the growing power of a grass-
roots movement, but it also proved that the struggle for civil rights
desperately needed the federal government to crack determined
white southern opposition. By mid-1956, the city still refused to
capitulate to Black demands despite the severe economic losses
inflicted by the boycott and defections by some white women who
drove their maids to work. Coinciding with the boycott, the
NAACP had initiated a lawsuit challenging the validity of gov-
ernment-sanctioned bus segregation. In June, the federal district
court ruled for the Black plaintiffs; in November, the Supreme

Court affirmed the decision. Only after the high tribunal spoke
did Montgomery finally abandon segregation on its bus lines. The
boycott played a necessary part in pointing the way toward free-
dom, but without the legal backing of the federal government, it
proved an insufficient means of ending Jim Crow. . . .
Little Rock
In 1957, the NAACP had won a federal court decree to desegre-
gate Central High School in the Arkansas capital. Led by Daisy
Bates, the association’s local president, nine Black youths set out
in September to attend school with whites for the first time in
their lives. They found their way blocked by Governor Orval
Faubus, who posted the national guard around campus to keep
the Black students from entering the school. When Eisenhower
met with the governor and warned him not to defy the federal
court order, Faubus pulled the troops. By this time, however, the
governor had inflamed racial passions beyond the boiling point;
and when the Little Rock Nine [the first black students to attend
Central] attempted to enter the high school, they were turned
back by raging mobs.
Faced with this obvious challenge to the federal government,
Eisenhower had little choice but to respond with force. The for-
mer five-star general dispatched the 101st Airborne Division to
Little Rock to preserve the peace and assure the safety of Black stu-
dents seeking to enter Central. In this episode Eisenhower revealed
the enormous might of the federal government while also expos-
ing the reluctance of presidents to deploy it. Concerned about
overstepping the boundaries imposed by the Constitution’s divi-
sion of powers between national and state governments, the chief
executive had allowed Arkansas as much leeway as possible and
intervened only when Washington’s authority came under direct
attack. Whatever reluctance to use force Eisenhower had shown,
his resolution of the crisis had inspired optimism among African
Americans. Roger Wilkins, a civil rights activist and scholar who
was twenty-five years old at the time, recalled, “Little Rock was a
major milestone. We felt the country was becoming more just and
the federal government was on our side.”
Nevertheless, this incident showed that the national government

remained a tentative ally for African Americans. Whatever rights
the Constitution guaranteed and the courts affirmed, the federal
government was likely to act only if pressured to do so. Events
such as Little Rock thus shaped an understandable crisis mental-
ity among civil rights proponents. Appeals to moral conscience
went only so far in persuading white officials to combat Jim Crow.
Presidents and members of Congress responded to grievances
more effectively when Blacks and their white allies exerted sub-
stantial political pressure or when their attempts to obtain equal-
ity provoked violence from white resisters. In other words, na-
tional lawmakers were more likely to respond to the threat of
possible racial firestorms than to abstract appeals to justice. In this
way, the government helped shape the logic for protest by signal-
ing to Blacks the need to confront racism head-on before Wash-
ington would choose to intervene.
Martin Luther King Jr.

Martin Luther King, Jr., was slowly making his way to this con-
clusion during the 1950s. Following the Montgomery bus boy-
cott, King had created the Southern Christian Leadership Con-
ference in 1957. Consisting mainly of Black ministers, the
organization operated as “the political arm of the Black church”
and reflected King’s commitment to nonviolent direct action as a
technique to battle all forms of racism. Not only did the Reverend
King seek to convert the hearts and minds of white racists through
appeals to their Christian consciences, but he and his followers
recognized the necessity of applying political pressure to change
racist behavior and practices. Accordingly, Black communities
would have to mount sustained mass demonstrations to confront
Jim Crow directly, bring the evil of racism out in the open, and
goad reforms from white authorities.
In the years after Montgomery, King’s efforts came up short. By
1960, massive resistance in the South had kept Black enfranchise-
ment to a minimum and blocked desegregation of public schools
and other facilities almost entirely. The federal government had
provided some relief through passage of two civil rights acts, but
Washington officials preferred that Black citizens voluntarily work
out settlements with southern politicians. In taking this approach,

national leaders helped to structure the civil rights struggle by
forcing Black southerners to devise creative tactics to confront
white supremacy. . . .
Birmingham
The federal government refused to flex its considerable muscle on
a day-to-day basis in the South, but it did respond to extraordi-
nary circumstances. Eisenhower had shown in Little Rock that the
national government would intervene to uphold federal author-
ity when it was directly threatened by state resistance. Kennedy
followed suit. He preferred to rely on reasonable dialogue with
state officials to persuade them to obey the law, but when such
conversations proved futile he had no choice but to act forcefully.
Such was the case with the University of Mississippi. The federal
courts had ordered the state to admit James Meredith as the first
Black student at Ole Miss. Governor Ross Barnett, as had Orval
Faubus in Arkansas, strung the president along to delay admis-
sion. In October 1962, the governor’s stalling tactics heightened
white resistance, and when Meredith showed up to attend classes
a riot erupted on campus. Only then did the president finally run
out of patience and send in federal troops to protect Meredith and
quell the disturbance, but not before two people died and 375
were injured. Once again, civil rights proponents learned the hard
way that if they wanted federal intervention, they would have to
produce a crisis that resulted in the breakdown of public order.
By the spring of 1963 Martin Luther King, Jr., had fully reached
this conclusion. One of his aides explained: “To take a moderate
approach hoping to get white help, doesn’t help. They nail you to
the cross, and it saps the enthusiasm of the followers. You’ve got
to have a crisis.” He selected Birmingham, Alabama, to provoke
federal intervention. The city had a long history of repression of
civil rights activists and labor union organizers, and its police
commissioner, Eugene “Bull” Connor, used an iron fist to turn
back any signs of insurgency. In addition, the Ku Klux Klan and
other terrorists had planted bombs to quiet local civil rights pro-
ponents such as the Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth, albeit unsuc-
cessfully. Into this cauldron of racial hostility, King brought his
troops to stir up the local Black community in a campaign against

Jim Crow. Indeed, under Shuttlesworth’s fearless direction Bir-
mingham Blacks had already been carrying on protests against
segregation, but they had failed to capture the kind of national at-
tention that would force the federal government to render suffi-
cient support.
The protests King spearheaded in April and May sparked fed-
eral interest. Unlike King’s previous experience in Albany, televi-
sion cameras and newspaper photographs produced powerful im-
ages of peaceful demonstrators suffering brutality at the hands of
Bull Connor’s law enforcement agents. Snarling police dogs bit
demonstrators, and firefighters unleashed high-power water hoses
to disperse protesters. Birmingham’s jails filled with Black
marchers, among them King. When the number of adults avail-
able for protest dwindled, King recruited children, some as young
as six years old, whose tender age did not keep them from getting
assaulted and arrested. Faced with a racial crisis spiraling out of
control, the Kennedy administration stepped up its efforts to re-
store peace. In early May, Justice Department negotiators helped
hammer out a settlement that initiated desegregation of restau-
rants and increased employment opportunities for Blacks. Un-
fortunately, this agreement did not stop random acts of violence.
A few days after the settlement, a bomb exploded at the hotel at
which King was staying. Although nobody was hurt, angry Blacks
lost patience and pelted police with rocks and bottles. Even more
horrible, several months later in September, a more lethal bomb
ripped through the basement of a Birmingham church and killed
four young Black girls.
The 1964 Civil Rights Act

Birmingham and scores of other demonstrations throughout the
South finally prompted President Kennedy to take a strong stand
against segregation and exert leadership on behalf of the Black
freedom movement. In early June 1963, he sent federal marshals
to ensure that Black students gain entry to the University of Al-
abama. In a stage-managed and highly publicized affair, Gover-
nor George Wallace appeared on campus, voiced his objections
in front of the administration building, and then stepped aside in
the face of superior federal might. But Kennedy’s greatest perfor-

mance came in a nationally televised address to the American
people. On the evening of June 11, he spoke powerfully about the
ethical imperative of providing African Americans with first-class
citizenship. Civil rights was “a moral issue,” he proclaimed, “as
old as the Scriptures and . . . as clear as the Constitution.” Deeply
concerned that the “fires of frustration and discord are burning
in every city,” the president warned that burgeoning racial crises
“cannot be met by repressive police action” or “quieted by token
moves or talk.” These words took on even greater urgency a few
hours later in Jackson, Mississippi, where the NAACP leader
Medgar Evers was gunned down and killed by a sniper.
Kennedy followed up his inspiring address by introducing a
comprehensive civil rights bill in Congress. It aimed mainly at fa-
cilitating school desegregation and opening up public accommo-
dations, such as restaurants and hotels, on an equal basis to Black
customers. Fueled by moral outrage, the measure was nonethe-
less tempered by political caution. The administration refused to
press for a provision that would create a commission to guaran-
tee equal employment opportunities for minorities, calculating
instead that it would make passage of the bill even more difficult
against southern congressional opposition. However, this did not
stop civil rights supporters in the legislature from adding this pro-
posal to the bill.
The civil rights forces sought to keep the fires of Kennedy’s
moral fervor lit by raising the political pressure. A. Philip Ran-
dolph now led the massive march on Washington he had first pro-
posed on the eve of World War II. With the NAACP, SCLC,
SNCC, and CORE among others behind him, Randolph called on
Blacks and whites to rally at the nation’s capital for jobs and free-
dom and, more immediately, to express support for the adminis-
tration’s pending civil rights bill. At first, Kennedy urged Black
leaders not to hold the march for fear of creating “an atmosphere
of intimidation” that would scare off uncommitted lawmakers
whose votes were needed to pass the bill. King brushed these ob-
jections aside by reminding the president that a well-disciplined,
nonviolent rally would mobilize “support in parts of the country
which don’t know the problems first hand.” Convinced by the
planners of their peaceful intentions and willingness to refrain

from disrupting government business, Kennedy swung his ap-
proval behind the march.
The August 28 rally attracted nearly a quarter of a million people
and a good deal of favorable publicity. In a dignified manner it
spotlighted the interracial vision of brotherhood that had charac-
terized the early years of the civil rights struggle and found voice
in the stirring words of King, who recited his dream that “all God’s
children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants
and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of
that old Negro spiritual, ‘Free at last! Free at last! Thank God
almighty, we are free at last.’”
Once again, rhetoric alone, no matter how well meaning,
proved insufficient to secure passage of civil rights legislation. The
bill was still stalled in the House of Representatives when Kennedy
was assassinated on November 22, 1963. A nation’s grief could not
immediately break the legislative logjam, even as a memorial to
the slain president. It took some eight months of painstaking ef-
forts in Congress before a bipartisan coalition of Democrats and
Republicans finally overcame southern opposition. On July 2,
1964, the most far-reaching civil rights statute since Reconstruc-
tion went into effect. It expanded authority of the federal govern-
ment to challenge school segregation as well as discrimination in
public accommodations and employment. To enforce its provi-
sions, the act set up the Equal Employment Opportunity Com-
mission, established the Community Relations Service, and em-
powered Washington to cut off federal funds to state and local
agencies that practiced racial bias.
Though there were pockets of resistance to it, within a relatively
short time Jim Crow signs and barriers were removed from pub-
lic facilities in the South. Progress in desegregating public schools
continued slowly, though the law empowered the federal govern-
ment to cut off funds from school districts that defied court or-
ders to open their doors to Black students. It would take another
four years for the Supreme Court to announce once and for all,
in Green v. County School Board (1968), that further delay was not
constitutionally permissible.
The movement’s legislative agenda received a big boost when
Lyndon Baines Johnson entered the White House upon Ken-

nedy’s death. The Texan had undergone a stunning transforma-
tion with respect to civil rights, from a congressman who had op-
posed the Truman administration’s civil rights program to a vice
president who embraced the civil rights movement as a moral and
political necessity. Not only was support for racial equality the
right thing to do in principle, but it also helped advance Johnson’s
ambitions to rise to the presidency, recruit enfranchised southern
Black voters to the Democratic Party, and give his native South an
opportunity to put the corrosive racial issue behind it. Conse-
quently, President Johnson displayed a passion for civil rights ad-
vancement that exceeded Kennedy’s. A legislative wizard in his
days in Congress, Johnson played a large part in engineering pas-
sage of the landmark 1964 law. . . .
By the end of the 1960s the civil rights movement, as it had ex-
isted for over two decades, had come to a conclusion. Martin
Luther King fell to an assassin’s bullet in April 1968, and though
the SCLC remained in operation, it never recovered from the loss
of its charismatic head. With SNCC and CORE on the decline,
this left the NAACP and the National Urban League (NUL), as the
major survivors of the old civil rights alliance. The moderates had
scored three major legislative victories and won numerous battles
in the courts to enforce desegregation and disfranchisement.
However, even moderation was not enough to sustain the strug-
gle at the national level once conservatives captured the White
House beginning with Richard Nixon in 1968. For the most part,
the civil rights groups that remained in existence sought to pre-
serve thc legislative and judicial victories they had obtained and
see that they were properly enforced.
Viewpoint 2
“The real accomplishments of the black freedom
struggle stemmed . . . from the efforts of the grass
roots organizers who actually built and directed the
movement in the South.”
Grassroots
Organizers Played
the Most Important
Role in the Civil
Rights Movement
David J. Garrow
David J. Garrow is a presidential distinguished professor at
Emory University Law School. He is the author of numerous
books and articles about the civil rights movement, including
Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern
Christian Leadership Conference. In the following viewpoint,
Garrow challenges civil rights scholarship that focuses primarily
on the policies and actions of nationally oriented—and com-
monly identified—civil rights organizations and leaders. To
David J. Garrow, “Commentary for Creative Tensions in the Leadership of

the Civil Rights Movement,” The Civil Rights Movement in America, edited
by Charles W. Eagles. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1986. Copy-
right © 1986 by the University Press of Mississippi. All rights reserved. Re-
produced by permission.
195
Garrow, the real backbone of the movement was a cadre of cru-

cial—albeit lesser known—grassroots leaders. As testament,
Garrow offers several examples of unsung heroes—ordinary
people who directed and sustained the movement and exerted a
great personal impact on national events. Grassroots workers
Diane Nash and James Bevel, for example, engaged in activities
that were, in fact, catalytic to the passage of the 1965 Voting
Rights Acts. The following viewpoint is excerpted from The
Civil Rights Movement in America, an anthology of perspectives
on civil rights history.
T oo often those who write about the civil rights movement em-
ploy too narrow and exclusive a concept of “leadership.” Im-
plicitly if not explicitly, they presume that leaders are simply those
individuals who are organizational chieftains or spokespersons.
They thus restrict our definition of leadership to administrators
and articulators, without looking as carefully and as thoughtfully
as they should for a more meaningful understanding of “leader-
ship.”
This overly narrow conception of leadership runs directly par-
allel to a similar tendency to devote a disproportionate amount of
scholarly attention to the national civil rights organizations of the
1950s and 1960s—the National Association for the Advancement
of Colored People (NAACP), the Southern Christian Leadership
Conference (SCLC), the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Com-
mittee (SNCC), the National Urban League (NUL) and the Con-
gress of Racial Equality (CORE). While concentrating studies on
those organizations and the individuals who headed them—Roy
Wilkins, Martin Luther King, Jr., John Lewis and Stokely
Carmichael, Whitney Young, and James Farmer—simultaneously
far too little scholarly attention has been devoted to local level civil
rights activities and to the grass roots organizers who actually mo-
bilized people to participate actively in the movement.
In the 1950s, the major strategic difference of opinion that ex-
isted among black civil rights activists was a division between
those who believed that courtroom litigation and judicial deci-
sions were the principal means for advancing black freedom and
those who contended that ordinary, grass roots people could take
a direct and meaningful hand in pursuing their own freedom.
While NAACP Executive Secretary Roy Wilkins and NAACP Legal
Defense and Educational Fund director Thurgood Marshall ar-
gued that the lawyerly expansion of the principles articulated by
the Supreme Court in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka was
the surest route to further black gains, Brotherhood of Sleeping
Car Porters president A. Philip Randolph and others colleagues
maintained that mass action, and not simply elite-sponsored lit-
igation, could bring about substantial racial change.
Those mass action proponents welcomed the Montgomery, Al-
abama, bus boycott of 1955–1956 as precisely the sort of opening
round in a new, mass-based southern freedom struggle they long
had hoped for. Similarly, those activists also welcomed the 1957
formation of the ministerially-oriented SCLC and the largely spon-
taneous black college student sit-in movement that spread like
wildfire across the South during the spring and early summer of
1960. On the other hand, NAACP administrators contended that it
was only a federal court ruling, not the mass boycott, that actually
desegregrated Montgomery’s buses, and they regretted both the
formation of SCLC and the appearance of SNCC, which grew out of
the 1960 sit-ins. Within just a few years’ time, both SCLC and SNCC,
employing different tactical choices, made the mass action strat-
egy the dominant approach of the 1960s black freedom struggle.
That deeply-rooted strategic division in central both to the sub-
sequent history of inter-organizational relations within the move-
ment and to the malapportionment of scholarly attention over the
past two decades. Like the one-time chieftains of the elite-oriented
civil rights organizations, many scholars have presumed that the
policies, statements and actions of the national civil rights orga-
nizations are the most importance substance of the movement’s
history. However, a more discerning look at the movement’s ac-
tual record of achievement in the south, and in the national po-
litical arena, reveals, upon careful examination, that the real ac-
complishments of the black freedom struggle stemmed not so
much from the activities of the administrators and articulators as
from the efforts of the grass roots organizers who actually built
and directed the movement in the South.
Influential Leaders
To say that most of the work of the movement was not done by
the commonly-identified leaders would seem obvious to all. The
basic point, however, in considerably broader than that: what the
carefully-scrutinized historical record shows is that the actual hu-
man catalysts of the movement, the people who really gave direc-
tion to the movement’s organizing work, the individuals whose
records reflect the greatest substantive accomplishments, were not
administrators or spokespersons, and were not those whom most
scholarship on the movement identifies as the “leaders.” Instead,
in any list, long or short, of the activists who had the greatest per-
sonal impact upon the course of the southern movement, the vast
majority of names will be ones that are unfamiliar to most read-
ers. Allow six brief examples to suffice. In Mississippi, no other
individuals did more to give both political direction and emo-
tional sustenance to movement activists than Robert Parris Moses,
a SNCC field worker who became the guiding force in COFO, the
Council of Federated Organizations, and Fannie Lou Hamer, the
relatively unlettered but impressively articulate Sunflower County
tenant farmer’s wife who in 1964 emerged as an influential grass
roots spokeswoman for the thousands of economically poor black
citizens who actually comprised the movement’s base.
In southwest Georgia, another major scene of movement ac-
tivism, the guiding spirit of much of the effort there, from the time
of his initial arrival in Terrell County as the sole paid field secretary
of SNCC to [1990], when he served on the Albany city council, was
Charles Sherrod, a little-heralded organizer who deserves much of
the credit for sparking and sustaining the entire southwest Georgia
movement. Although Sherrod, like Moses, was an “outside agita-
tor” initially sent in by SNCC, in Selma, Alabama, one of the move-
ment’s famous battlegrounds, the key individual figure was a long-
time native, Mrs. Amelia P. Boynton, whose impact there was
much like Mrs. Hamer’s in Mississippi. A crucial figure in orga-
nizing the initial indigenous activism, in first bringing SNCC work-
ers to Selma, and in persuading Dr. King and SCLC to make Selma
the focal point of their 1965 voting rights protests, Mrs. Boynton
had as substantial an impact on civil rights developments in Al-
abama as anyone, excepting perhaps only Birmingham’s Reverend
Fred L. Shuttlesworth, another widely-underestimated and under-

appreciated grass roots leader.
Diane Nash and James Bevel

Lastly, inside of SNCC and SCLC, two individuals who had crucial
but often-overlooked roles in repeatedly influencing important
movement decisions were Diane Nash and James Bevel, both of
whom emerged from the Nashville movement of 1959–1961.
Nash played a central part in sustaining the 1961 Freedom Rides
when white Alabama violence threatened to halt them, and her
April, 1962 memo reprimanding movement activists for not al-
ways living up in practice to their much-touted slogan of “jail, no
bail” had a significant impact on King and dozens of others. To-
gether with Bevel, Nash in September, 1963, originated one of the
most important strategic gameplans of the southern struggle. Four
months earlier Bevel, a young SCLC staff aide, had been person-
ally responsible for SCLC’s crucial tactical decision to send young
children into the streets of Birmingham during the height of the
protests there, the crucial turning point in convincing white busi-
ness leaders to grant the movement’s demands and an important
influence on President John F. Kennedy’s decision to send to Con-
gress the bill that eventually became the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
Nash and Bevel, in the immediate aftermath of the Birmingham
church bombing that killed four young girls, envisioned a com-
prehensive mass action campaign to close down the regular func-
tioning of Alabama state of government and “GROW”—Get Rid
Of [Alabama governor George C.] Wallace. Though rejected by
King, and other organization heads at that time, the Nash/Bevel
blueprint started King and SCLC on an Alabama Project that eigh-
teen months later, following various changes and refinements, cul-
minated in the landmark Selma-to-Montgomery march and con-
gressional passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act.
Backbone of the Movement

It takes nothing away from King, Wilkins, Whitney Young or James
Farmer to acknowledge that Moses, Hamer, Sherrod, Boynton,
Nash and Bevel equally merit the designation as civil rights “lead-
ers” if that label is to be applied in its most substantively meaning-
ful way. Indeed, it could be argued further, with considerable jus-

tification, that catalytic grass root workers like those six deserve the
appellation more than do New York-based bureaucrats such as
Wilkins and Young. The real emergence of a sustained and wide-
spread movement in the South can be traced, in many particulars,
to the August, 1961, SNCC decision to create a cadre of locally-
based, full time grass roots organizers, the first time that indigenous
activists in many areas of the rural Deep South had such day-to-
day organizational assistance available to them. Those full-time
workers, usually affiliated with SNCC, CORE or SCLC, constituted
the real backbone of the southern movement during the years of
its greatest activism and achievements, 1961–1966. Similarly, the
somewhat precipitous decline of the southern freedom struggle be-
tween 1966 and 1968 can also largely be traced to the burnout and
eventual departure from full time organizing of most of that cru-
cial cadre. Although this is not the place to make the argument in
its most extended form, it was the interaction between the existing
indigenous activists and these full time field secretaries that gener-
ated most of the actual “leadership” of the southern struggle. As
many SNCC veterans in particular can well articulate, it was the first-
hand experience of working with people, day in, day out, that ed-
ucated both local activists and field secretaries to the item-by-item,
conversation-by-conversation reality of what “leadership” really
amounted to in the civil rights movement.
The best of the national organization chieftains and spokesper-
sons, namely King, Lewis and Farmer, all privately appreciated
how their heavy responsibilities for making speeches, raising
funds, and stimulating organizational publicity oftentimes exces-
sively drew them away from the real, hands on work of the move-
ment. King and Farmer in particular were troubled by how their
administrative tasks and the “organization maintenance” needs
of SCLC and CORE often took priority over any opportunities for
sustained personal involvement in the activities that constituted
the real purpose of their organizations. Thus at least these men, if
not all of the other administrators and articulators of movement
organizations, realized full well that leadership of the freedom
struggle lay in many, many hands other than those of the “Big,
Six” organization heads often singled out by the news media.
S
E
For Further Discussion
Chapter 1
1. Compare the policies of W.E.B. Du Bois and Booker T. Wash-
ington. Whose program promised more immediate gains for
blacks? Was it possible for blacks to better their condition with-
out pressing for the political and social rights advocated by Du
Bois?
2. Was Washington’s case for black accommodation to white so-
ciety an appropriate response to black grievances when viewed
in a historical context? Why did Washington’s policies fall out
of popularity after his death in 1915?
3. Even before the heyday of the civil rights movement in the
mid–twentieth century, the black freedom struggle was char-
acterized by both judicial activism and social activism. Did the
legal machinery of the National Association for the Advance-
ment of Colored People (NAACP) preclude or insubstantiate
A. Philip Randolph’s ideas on mass-action campaigns, or did
the two approaches complement one another?
Chapter 2
1. What evidence does Thurgood Marshall give to counter James
Jackson Kilpatrick’s claim that southern racial practices were
relatively benign?
2. Why did the authors and signers of the Southern Manifesto
find the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Educa-
tion an abuse of judicial power? Explain how both Earl Warren
and the Southern Manifesto authors use Plessy v. Ferguson to
bolster their antithetical views regarding school segregation.
3. Does Louis Anthes successfully back up his argument that the
Brown v. Board of Education verdict was ultimately self-
defeating in its portrayal of blacks as powerless victims? Given
his views, how might Julius L. Chambers answer Anthes’s crit-
icism of Brown?
201
Chapter 3
1. To what extent is John F. Kennedy’s call for federal civil rights
legislation an emotional appeal to Americans? Similarly, how
does James Farmer present his claim that federal and state ef-
forts are inadequate?
2. Describe Martin Luther King Jr.’s program of nonviolence as
a strategy for advancing civil rights. At the same time, compare
King’s views to those of Malcolm X. Why did the latter feel that
it was impossible to keep the movement for civil rights nonvi-
olent?
3. How does Stokely Carmichael justify the rise of black-power
politics in the 1960s? What were the advantages and disadvan-
tages of this increasingly militant outlook? Does Kenneth
Clark’s criticism of this trend seem justified?
4. Did the mass-action campaigns led by King successfully pub-
licize black demands? Did they pave the way for the legal vic-
tories of the NAACP?
Chapter 4
1. Steven F. Lawson cites Brown v. Board of Education as a testa-
ment to the tremendous power wielded by the federal govern-
ment. In your view, did the Supreme Court ruling pertaining
to school desegregation extend beyond the public schools to
accelerate the pace of civil rights in general? If so, does this lend
credibility to Lawson’s analysis of the role of the federal gov-
ernment?
2. What evidence does David J. Garrow give to support his con-
tention that grassroots activists exerted enormous influence
over national events? In your opinion, was grassroots activity
critical to the success of the civil rights movement?
S
E
Chronology
1895
Booker T. Washington delivers his Atlanta Exposition speech,
which accepts segregation of the races.
1896
The Supreme Court rules in Plessy v. Ferguson that separate but
equal treatment of the races is constitutional.
1905
The Niagara Movement is founded by W.E.B. Du Bois and
other black leaders to urge more direct action to achieve black
civil rights.
1909
The National Association for the Advancement of Colored
People (NAACP) is organized.
1910
National Urban League is founded to help the conditions of ur-
ban African Americans.
1931
Farrad Muhammad establishes in Detroit what will become the
Black Muslim Movement.
1941
A. Philip Randolph threatens a massive march on Washington
unless the Roosevelt administration takes measures to ensure
black employment in defense industries; Roosevelt agrees to es-
tablish Fair Employment Practices Committee (FEPC).
1942
The Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) is organized in
Chicago.
1943
Race riots in Detroit and Harlem cause black leaders to ask
their followers to be less demanding in asserting their com-
203
mitment to civil rights; A. Philip Randolph breaks ranks to call

for civil disobedience against Jim Crow schools and railroads.
1946
The Supreme Court, in Morgan v. The Commonwealth of Vir-
ginia, rules that state laws requiring racial segregation on buses
violates the Constitution when applied to interstate passengers.
April 9–23, 1947
Bayard Rustin organizes integrated group trips on trains and
buses through Kentucky, Tennessee, North Carolina, and Vir-
ginia.
October 29, 1947
To Secure These Rights, the report by the President’s Commit-
tee on Civil Rights, is released; the commission appointed by
President Harry S. Truman calls for the elimination of racial
segregation and recommends government action to secure civil
rights for all Americans.
July 26, 1948
President Harry S. Truman issues an executive order desegre-
gating the armed services.
May 17, 1954
In Brown v. Board of Education the Supreme Court declares
separate educational facilities “inherently unequal.”
May 31, 1955
Supreme Court, rejecting the NAACP’s plea for complete and
total desegregation by September 1955, orders desegregation
“with all deliberate speed.”
September 23, 1955
An all-white jury finds defendants innocent of murdering black
teenager Emmett Till after nationally publicized trial; the de-
fendants later confess to the killing.
November 1955
The Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC) bans racial seg-
regation in all facilities and vehicles engaged in interstate trans-
portation.
CHRONOLOGY 205
December 1, 1955
Rosa Parks is arrested for refusing to give up her bus seat to a
white person; the action triggers a bus boycott in Montgomery,
Alabama, led by Martin Luther King Jr.
February 3, 1956
Autherine Lucy wins a federal court order admitting her to the
University of Alabama only to have the university permanently
“expel” her; the University of Alabama remains segregated for
seven more years.
December 21, 1956
The Montgomery bus boycott ends after city receives U.S.
Supreme Court order to desegregate city buses.
January 11, 1957
Martin Luther King Jr. and a number of southern black cler-
gymen create the Southern Christian Leadership Conference
(SCLC).
August 29, 1957
Congress passes the first civil rights legislation since Recon-
struction: The Civil Rights Act of 1957 establishes a civil rights
division at the Justice Department and provides penalties for
violating the voting rights of a U.S. citizen.
September 4, 1957
On the orders of Arkansas governor Orval Faubus, Arkansas
National Guardsmen block nine black students from entering
Central High School in Little Rock.
September 24, 1957
President Dwight D. Eisenhower dispatches one thousand
paratroopers of the 101st Airborne Division to Little Rock to
enforce a federal court order integrating Central High School.
September 29, 1958
The Supreme Court, in Cooper v. Aaron, rules that “evasive
schemes” cannot be used to circumvent school desegregation.
1959
Sit-in campaigns by college students desegregate eating facili-
ties in St. Louis, Chicago, and Bloomington, Indiana; the Ten-
nessee Christian Leadership Conference holds brief sit-ins in
Nashville department stores.
February 1, 1960
Four black students stage a sit-in at a Woolworth’s lunch
counter in Greensboro, North Carolina; the sit-in movement
to desegregate southern restaurants, hotels, movie theaters, li-
braries, and parks spreads to other southern states.
April 1960
The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) is
formed at a student conference in Raleigh, North Carolina.
May 6, 1960
President Eisenhower signs civil rights legislation authorizing
federal judges to appoint referees to assist blacks seeking to reg-
ister and to vote.
October 19, 1960
Martin Luther King Jr. is arrested during an Atlanta sit-in;
Democratic presidential candidate John F. Kennedy telephones
Mrs. King to express concern.
December 5, 1960
The Supreme Court rules that discrimination in bus terminal
restaurants is a violation of the Interstate Commerce Act.
March 13, 1961
James Farmer, national director of CORE, calls for volunteers
to conduct “Freedom Rides” throughout the South.
May 1961
White and black freedom riders are arrested and assaulted in
North and South Carolina and Alabama; one bus is burned by
a white mob. The CORE-sponsored Freedom Ride disbands
and the movement is taken over by SNCC volunteers; the Ken-
nedy administration sends federal marshals to assure the safety
of the freedom riders.
CHRONOLOGY 207
November 1961
Local black organizations in Albany, Georgia, form the Albany
Movement to demonstrate for voting rights and desegregation.
December 11–14, 1961
Hundreds of demonstrators participate in marches in Albany,
Georgia. Martin Luther King Jr. and aides arrive on December
15.
May 31, 1962
James Meredith files suit claiming racial discrimination after
he is denied admission into the University of Mississippi.
August 1962
Albany Movement ends with many of its goals unmet.
August 7, 1962
A SNCC Voter Registration School opens in Pike County, Mis-
sissippi, marking the first such effort in the history of the state.
September 30, 1962
President Kennedy federalizes the National Guard and sends
several hundred federal marshals to Mississippi to guarantee
James Meredith’s admission to the University of Mississippi
Law School over the opposition of Governor Ross Barnett and
other whites; two persons are killed in a campus riot.
November 20, 1962
President Kennedy signs an executive order barring racial dis-
crimination in federally financed housing.
February 2, 1963
Martin Luther King Jr. and other SCLC leaders arrive in Bir-
mingham, Alabama, to lead a civil rights campaign.
Spring 1963
CORE takes the lead in protesting discrimination in northern
cities.
April 1963
Martin Luther King Jr. opens his campaign to desegregate Bir-
mingham and is arrested on April 12; while incarcerated King
composes his “Letter from Birmingham City Jail.”
May 3, 1963
Birmingham police chief Eugene “Bull” Connor turns police
dogs and fire hoses against nonviolent demonstrators in Bir-
mingham.
May 5, 1963
Three thousand protesters are jailed in Birmingham—the
largest number of people imprisoned at any one time in the
history of the civil rights movement.
May 10, 1963
An accord is reached in Birmingham; within ninety days lunch
counters, rest rooms, and drinking fountains will be desegre-
gated in the city.
June 11, 1963
Black students Vivian Malone and James Hood enter the Uni-
versity of Alabama despite a demonstration of resistance by
Governor George Wallace; in a nationally televised speech Pres-
ident John F. Kennedy calls segregation morally wrong.
June 12, 1963
NAACP field secretary Medgar Evers is shot and killed as he
enters his home in Jackson, Mississippi.
August 28, 1963
Over 250,000 Americans gather at the Lincoln Memorial to
urge the passage of civil rights legislation and hear Martin
Luther King Jr. deliver his “I Have A Dream” speech. Malcolm
X dismisses the march as “the Farce on Washington.”
September 15, 1963
Four young girls are killed when a bomb explodes at a Baptist
church in Birmingham, Alabama.
CHRONOLOGY 209
April 26, 1964

SNCC workers organize the Mississippi Freedom Democratic
Party (MFDP).
Summer 1964
Enlisting the help of white volunteers, SNCC and CORE seek
to register black voters across the South in the “Freedom Sum-
mer” campaign.
June 21, 1964
Three civil rights workers, Michael Schwerner and Andrew
Goodman, both white New Yorkers, and James Chaney, a black
student from Meridian, Mississippi, are murdered near
Philadelphia, Mississippi.
July 2, 1964
President Lyndon Johnson signs the Civil Rights Act of 1964,
which prohibits discrimination in most public accommoda-
tions, authorizes the federal government to withhold funds
from programs practicing discrimination, and creates the Equal
Employment Opportunity Commission.
August 22–26, 1964
At the Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City, New
Jersey, delegates of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party
ask to be seated as the legitimate Democratic Party of Missis-
sippi; they refuse the compromise offer of two delegate seats.
December 10, 1964
Martin Luther King Jr. is awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
February 18, 1965
Civil rights marcher Jimmie Lee Jackson is shot and killed in
Marion, Alabama.
February 21, 1965
Malcolm X is assassinated while addressing a rally of his fol-
lowers in New York City; three black men are ultimately con-
victed of the murder.
March 7, 1965
“Bloody Sunday”: six hundred marchers just outside Selma, Al-
abama, are attacked by state troopers with nightsticks and tear
gas.
March 9, 1965
Martin Luther King Jr. leads a voting rights march in Selma but
turns back before a state trooper barricade.
March 11, 1965
The death of white Unitarian minister James J. Reeb following
a beating by local whites in Selma triggers demonstrations in
many northern cities.
March 21–25, 1965
Following a federal judge’s court order allowing the march, and
under federalized protection, Martin Luther King Jr. leads a
voting rights march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama.
August 6, 1965
President Johnson signs the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which
outlaws literacy tests and empowers the Justice Department to
supervise federal elections in seven southern states.
August 11–16, 1965
Rioting in the black ghetto of Watts in Los Angeles leads to
thirty-five deaths, nine hundred injuries, and over thirty-five
hundred arrests.
January 1966
Martin Luther King Jr. moves to Chicago to begin his first civil
rights campaign in a northern city.
March 25, 1966
The Supreme Court bans poll taxes for all elections.
May 16, 1966
Stokely Carmichael replaces John Lewis as chairman of SNCC.
June 6, 1966
James Meredith is shot by a sniper while on a one-man “march
against fear” in Mississippi.
CHRONOLOGY 211
June 7–26, 1966

Other civil rights leaders, including King and Carmichael, com-
plete the “Meredith march”; the slogan “black power” is first
used by Carmichael.
July 1966
The CORE national convention adopts a resolution in support
of black power; the NAACP convention officially opposes the
doctrine.
August 5, 1966
Martin Luther King Jr. leads an integrated march in Chicago
and is wounded when whites throw bottles and bricks at
demonstrators.
October 1966
The Black Panther Party (BPP) is founded in Oakland, Cali-
fornia.
December 1966
SNCC votes to exclude whites from membership.
June 13, 1967
Thurgood Marshall is the first black to be nominated to serve
on the Supreme Court.
February 25, 1967
Martin Luther King Jr. delivers his first speech devoted entirely
to the war in Vietnam, which he calls “one of history’s most
cruel and senseless wars”; his position causes estrangement with
President Johnson and is criticized by the NAACP.
May 10–11, 1967
Rioting at all-black Jackson State College in Mississippi leads
to one death and two serious injuries.
June 19, 1967
A federal judge orders Washington, D.C., schools to end de
facto school segregation.
July 1967
Rioting in the black ghetto of Newark, New Jersey, leaves 23
dead and 725 injured; Rioting in Detroit leave 43 dead and 324
injured; President Johnson appoints Governor Otto Kerner of
Illinois to head a commission to investigate recent urban riots.
February 29, 1968
The Kerner Commission issues its report, warning that the na-
tion is “moving toward two societies, one black, one white—
separate and unequal.”
March 18, 1968
Martin Luther King Jr. travels to Memphis, Tennessee, to help
settle a garbage workers strike.
April 4, 1968
Martin Luther King Jr. is assassinated by James Earl Ray in
Memphis, Tennessee, precipitating riots in more than one hun-
dred cities.
April 11, 1968
Congress passes civil rights legislation prohibiting racial dis-
crimination in the sale or rental of housing.
May 11, 1968
Ralph Abernathy, Martin Luther King Jr.’s successor as head of
the SCLC, leads Poor People’s Campaign in Washington, D.C.
October 30, 1969
The Supreme Court replaces its 1954 decision calling for “all
deliberate speed” in school desegregation by unanimously or-
dering that all segregation in schools must end “at once.”
S
E
For Further Research
Books
Donzaleigh Abernathy, Partners to History: Martin Luther King,
Jr., Ralph Abernathy, and the Civil Rights Movement. New York:
Crown, 2003.
Ralph Abernathy, And the Walls Came Tumbling Down. New
York: Harper & Row, 1989.
Jack Bass and Walter De Vries, Transformation of Southern Poli-
tics: Social Change and Political Consequence Since 1945. New
York: BasicBooks, 1976.
Taylor Branch, Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954–
1963. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1988.
Stewart Burns, To the Mountaintop: Martin Luther King Jr.’s Sa-
cred Mission to Save America, 1955–1968. New York: Harper-
SanFrancisco, 2004.
Devon W. Carbado and Donald Weise, Time on Two Crosses: The
Collected Writings of Bayard Rustin. San Francisco: Cleis, 2003.
Clayborne Carson, ed., The Movement: 1964–1970. New York:
Greenwood, 1993.
Bettye Collier-Thomas and V.P. Franklin, eds., Sisters in the Strug-
gle: African American Women in the Civil Rights–Black Power
Movement. New York: New York University Press, 2004.
James Farmer, Lay Bare the Heart: An Autobiography of the Civil
Rights Movement. New York: Arbor House, 1985.
Leon Friedman, ed., The Civil Rights Reader: Basic Documents of
the Civil Rights Movement. New York: Walker, 1968.
Frye Gaillard, Cradle of Freedom: Alabama and the Movement That
Changed America. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press,
2004.
213
David J. Garrow, ed., We Shall Overcome: The Civil Rights Move-

ment in the United States in the 1950s and 1960s. Brooklyn, NY:
Carlson, 1989.
Peter Goldman, The Death and Life of Malcolm X. Chicago: Uni-
versity of Chicago Press, 1979.
Paul Goodman, Of One Blood: Abolitionism and the Origins of
Racial Equality. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of Cali-
fornia Press, 1998.
Grace Elizabeth Hale, Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segrega-
tion in the South, 1890–1940. New York: Pantheon, 1998.
Martin Luther King Jr., Where Do We Go from Here? Chaos or
Community? New York: Harper & Row, 1967.
———, Why We Can’t Wait. New York: Harper & Row, 1963.
Michael J. Klarman, From Jim Crow to Civil Rights: The Supreme
Court and the Struggle for Racial Equality. New York: Oxford
University Press, 2004.
Steven F. Lawson, Civil Rights Crossroads: Nation, Community,
and the Black Freedom Struggle. Lexington: University Press of
Kentucky, 2003.
Peter B. Levy, ed., Let Freedom Ring: A Documentary History of the
Civil Rights Movement. New York: Praeger, 1992.
Aldon D. Morris, The Origins of the Civil Rights Movement: Black
Communities Organizing for Change. New York: Free Press, 1984.
Charles Payne, I’ve Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tra-
dition and the Mississippi Freedom Struggle. Berkeley and Los
Angeles: University of California Press, 1995.
Charles Payne and Adam Green, eds., Time Longer than Rope: A
Century of African American Activism, 1850–1950. New York:
New York University Press, 2003.
Fred Powledge, Free at Last? The Civil Rights Movement and the
People Who Made It. Boston: Little, Brown, 1991.
FOR FURTHER RESEARCH 215
William T. Martin Riches, The Civil Rights Movement: Struggle and

Resistance. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004.
Bayard Rustin, Down the Line. Chicago: Quadrangle, 1971.
Fredrik Sunnemark, Ring Out Freedom! The Voice of Martin Luther
King, Jr., and the Making of the Civil Rights Movement. Bloom-
ington: Indiana University Press, 2004.
Herman Talmadge, You and Segregation. Birmingham, AL: Vul-
can, 1955.
James M. Washington, ed., A Testament of Hope. San Francisco:
Harper & Row, 1986.
Juan Williams, Eyes on the Prize: America’s Civil Rights Years, 1954–
1965. New York: Viking, 1987.
Web Sites
Africanaonline, www.africanaonline.com. This Web site offers ex-
tensive information on African American issues, including the
civil rights movement and its leaders. Biographical information,
primary-source material, and articles are available.
History Net/African American History, http://Afroamhistory.com.
This comprehensive site maintains information and links to
other sites about the events, leaders, and court cases that im-
pacted the civil rights movement.
King Center, www.thekingcenter.org. The King Center, estab-
lished in 1968 by Coretta Scott King, offers a wide variety of
programs and educational resources, including the King Library
and Archives, the world’s largest repository of primary-source
material on Martin Luther King Jr. and other leaders.
S
E
Index
abolition movement, 32, 76–77 190–91
affirmative action, Supreme Black Nationalism, rise of,
Court opinion limiting, 19–20
117–18 Black Panthers, 19
African Americans Black Power
are defined by blackness and blacks should strive for,
powerlessness, 150–51 147–58
should not agitate for civil con, 159–68
rights, 24–29 psychological appeal of,
con, 30–34 166–68
should strive for Black blacks. See African Americans
Power, 147–58 Black Worker (newspaper), 57
con, 159–68 Bloody Sunday (1965), 18–19
agape, 137–39 Bond, Horace Mann, 54
American Dilemma, An Bowles, Chester, 80
(Myrdal), 40 Boynton, Amelia P., 198
Anthes, Louis, 113–14 Brown v. Board of Education
Armstrong, Samuel Chapman, (1954), 13, 61, 159
47 failed to promote civil rights,
“Atlanta Compromise,” 25 113–18
as beginning of new era in con, 105–12
race relations, 44 limitations of, 107–109
Atlanta Constitution use of, in limiting affirmative
(newspaper), 82 action, 117–18
Attucks, Crispus, 60 Warren’s decision in, 93–98
white resistance to, 72–73,
Barnett, Ross, 190 86, 176
Bell, Derrick, 107 Bruce, Roscoe Conkling, 46
Better Day Coming: Blacks and Bush, George H.W., 111
Equality, 1890–2000 Byrnes, James, 82
(Fairclough), 43
Bevel, James, 196, 199 Calista, Donald J., 52
Biddle, Francis, 65 Carmichael, Stokely, 120, 147,
Birmingham march (1963), 196
216
INDEX 217
on community community organizations

organizations, 156–57 role of, in Montgomery bus
on integration, 152–53 boycott, 187
Chambers, Julius L., 105, 106 will help achieve civil rights,
Chesnutt, Charles W., 53 130–31
civil rights Community Relations Service,
can be secured through legal 193
action, 61–70 Congress of Racial Equality
can be secured through mass (CORE), 15, 128
action, 56–60, 131–32, 197 adopts militant agenda, 19
federal legislation on, 121–27 importance of community
King’s protest campaigns organization to, 131
had limited impact on, Connor, Eugene “Bull,” 17, 190
169–73 Constitution, U.S. See specific
con, 174–79 amendments
legalistic approach to, Contempt and Pity: Social
175–78 Policy and the Image of the
Civil Rights Act(s) Damaged Black Psyche,
of 1870, 63 1880–1996 (Scott), 116
of 1957, 15 Councill, William H., 52
of 1964, 193–94 Council of Federated
significance of, 177 Organizations (COFO), 198
have been neglected, 67–69 Crain, Robert L., 108
Civil Rights Codes (1860s), 39 Crisis (journal), 30
civil rights movement Cummings, Homer S., 65
impact of King’s death on, Cumming v. County Board of
181 Education (1899), 95
lack of consensus in, 120
legacy of, 20 Debating the Civil Rights
most important role in, was Movement, 1945–1968
played by (Lawson), 184
grassroots organizers, Denton, Virginia, 49
178–79, 195–200 Douglass, Frederick, 60
national leaders, 183–94 Dred Scott case, 77
Clark, Kenneth, 159 Du Bois, W.E.B., 13, 30, 38
Clarkson, Thomas, 32 challenge to Washington’s
Common Dream, A (National “Atlanta Compromise” by,
Research Council), 109 25
on conciliation with white Freedom Summer (1964), 18

South, 51–52 Friedman, Lawrence J., 53–54
on limitations of Brown Future of the American Negro
decision, 107 (Washington), 39
response to Washington’s
pragmatic approach, Garrow, David J., 195
22–23 Garvey, Marcus, 22, 143–44
Gilman, Charlotte, 32
Eisenhower, Dwight, 93, 188 Gong Lum v. Rice (1927), 95,
Emancipation Proclamation, 101
60 government, U.S.
Equal Employment Civil Rights Act of 1964 and
Opportunity Commission, powers of, 193
193 influence of, on civil rights
Evers, Medgar, 172 movement, 185–86
legislation will strengthen
Fairclough, Adam, 42, 43, 177 civil rights, 121–27
Fair Employment Practice con, 128–32
Committee (FECP), 170 should not interfere in
Farmer, James, 128, 196, 200 school segregation, 99–104
Faubus, Orval, 115, 188 Green v. County School Board
Fifteenth Amendment, 62 (1968), 193
rights under, 63–64 Griffin, John, 87
thwarting of, during
Reconstruction, 77 Hamer, Fannie Lou, 198
Fortune, T. Thomas, 48, 53 Hampton Institute, 47
Fourteenth Amendment, 12, Harlan, John Marshall, 117,
62, 72 127
as inconclusive on school Harlan, Louis, 49
segregation, 94–95 Henry, Patrick, 92
rights under, 63 Hope, John, 53
thwarting of, during Houston, Charles Hamilton,
Reconstruction, 77 114, 173
Franklin, John Hope, 92, 162 Humphrey, Hubert H., 149
Freedom Democratic Party, Hunter, Tip, 65
132
Freedom Rides (1961), 15–16, “I Have a Dream” speech
199 (King), 18, 193
INDEX 219
Jim Crow, 22 Montgomery bus boycott

abandonment of, 90–91 and, 187
black response to, 12–13 organizes SCLC, 189
Johnson, Lyndon B., 149 protest campaigns of, had
importance of civil rights limited impact on civil
advancement to, 193–94 rights, 169–73
signs Civil Rights Act, 18, con, 174–79
115–16 recognized importance of
signs Voting Rights Act, 19 grassroots organizers, 200
Johnson administration, 177 Ku Klux Klan, 12, 18, 190
Journal of Social Psychology,
83 Lawson, Steven F., 183
Justice Department, U.S., 191 “Letter from Birmingham Jail”
establishment of Civil Rights (King), 17
Section in, 65 Lewis, John, 196, 200
has undermined Lincoln, Abraham, 60
desegregation plans, Little Rock, Arkansas, 188–89
110–11 Logan, Rayford, 162
lynchings, 12
Kennedy, John F., 16, 121 prosecution of, 65
addresses nation on civil
rights, 192 Mack, Adam, 174
assassination of, 18 Malcolm X, 19, 120, 140
on civil rights workers, on Black Nationalism,
126–27 141–45
influence of southern March on Washington (1963),
marches on, 172, 191, 199 17–18, 192
integration of University of Marshall, Thurgood, 61, 74,
Mississippi and, 190 112, 173
Kilpatrick, James Jackson, 86 mass action
Kilson, Martin, 35 civil rights can be secured
King, Martin Luther, Jr., 11, through, 56–60, 131–32
14, 120, 140, 196 vs. legal approach, 197
assassination of, 20, 181, 194 McCain, Franklin, 179
Birmingham march and, McGill, Ralph, 83
190–91 McLaurin v. Oklahoma (1950),
March on Washington and, 97, 186
17–18, 192, 193 Meredith, James, 190
military, racial segregation in, rights, 169–73

13, 56 con, 174–79
Miller, Kelly, 52 is needed to achieve civil
Milliken v. Bradley (1974), 110 rights, 133–39
Mitchell, Clarence, Jr., 170, con, 140–46
171, 172, 173 tenets of, 134–37
Montagu, Ashley, 92 northern states
Montgomery bus boycott public school segregation in,
(1955), 14–15, 187–88 116
role of NAACP in, 171–72 racism in, 165
Moses, Robert Parris (Bob),
175, 198 Parks, Rosa, 14
Murphy, Frank, 65 Paterson, William B., 52
Myrdal, Gunnar, 39, 40 Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), 12,
14, 72, 93
NAACP Legal Defense Fund, prejudice
111, 114 southern white denial of, 92
strategy of, 175 see also racism
Nash, Diane, 196, 199 Prosser, Gabriel, 60
National Association for the
Advancement of Colored race relations, current vs. in
People (NAACP), 13 post-Reconstruction period,
founding of, 22 162–63
role in direct action race riots, of 1960s, 19–20
campaigns, 169 racism, as American dilemma,
see also NAACP Legal 160–61
Defense Fund Randolph, A. Philip, 17, 56,
National Research Council, 170, 192, 197
109 Reconstruction, 77
Negro Health Week, 51 retrogression in civil rights
New York Age (newspaper), 44 after, 12, 162–63
New York Herald Tribune southern whites have
(newspaper), 90 misrepresented, 148–49
Niagara Movement, 22, 34 Roberts v. City of Boston
Nixon, E.D., 187 (1849), 100
Nixon, Richard, 194 Robinson, Jo Ann Gibson, 187
nonviolence resistance Roosevelt, Franklin D., 57, 170
had limited impact on civil Roosevelt, Theodore, 40
INDEX 221
symbolic value of, 50 Smith v. Allwright (1944), 66,

white reaction to, 45 114
Roper, Elmo, 79 Southern Case for School
Segregation, The (Kilpatrick),
Scalia, Antonin, 117–18 86
Scott, Daryl Michael, 116 Southern Christian Leadership
segregation Conference (SCLC), 15, 120
in federal public housing, 69 community mobilization by,
is morally wrong, 74–85 176–77
con, 86–92 creation of, 189
myth of racial superiority Southern Manifesto, 99
and, 85 southern states
psychological harm of, dual society in, 87–88
81–85, 160–61 whites in, views on race
in public schools relations by, 86–92
government should not states
interfere in, 99–104 civil rights statutes of, 69–70
in the North, 116 see also northern states;
residential, 78–79 southern states
Selma march (1965), 18–19, Stride Toward Freedom (King),
175 134
as impetus for civil rights Student Nonviolent
legislation, 176 Coordinating Committee
local organizer of, 198 (SNCC), 15
separate-but-equal doctrine, adopts militant agenda, 19
75 grassroots organization by,
see also Brown v. Board of 156, 200
Education; Plessy v. voter registration drive of,
Ferguson 18
Shelley v. Kraemer (1948), 69, Sweatt v. Painter (1950), 96,
114 97, 114, 186
Sherrod, Charles, 198
Shuttlesworth, Fred L., 190, Taft, William Howard, 40
191, 199 on separate-but-equal
slavery doctrine, 101
agitation brought an end to, Talmadge, Herman, 82
32 Thirteenth Amendment
legacy of, 11–13 rights under, 63
thwarting of, during schools, 13–14

Reconstruction, 77 on separate-but-equal
Tillman, Ben, 45 doctrine, 186
To Redeem the Soul of America: Washington, Booker T., 24
The Southern Christian achievements of, 48–49
Leadership Conference and Black Power as a parallel
Martin Luther King, Jr. with accommodationist
(Fairclough), 177 plan of, 167
Tubman, Harriet, 60 on blacks’ claim of rights, 45
Turner, Nat, 60 leadership of, was effective,
Tuskegee Institute, 41, 42, 42–55
45–46, 47–48 con, 35–41
precarious position of, 52 leadership paradigm of,
37–38
unitary status, 110 opponents of, 48–49, 53–54
Universal Negro Improvement pragmatic approach of, 22
Association, 22, 143–44 on prejudice, 46–47
University of Alabama, Watson, Denton L., 169
integration of, 191 Wells, Ida B., 52
University of Mississippi, “white backlash,” Black Power
integration of, 190 movement and, 165–66
Up from Slavery White Citizens’ Council, 73
(Washington), 43 whites
role of, in Washington’s
Vesey, Denmark, 60 accommodation plan,
Virginia v. Rives (1879), 63 38–40, 44
Voting Rights Act (1964), 19, southern, views on race
36 relations by, 86–92
significance of, 177–78 Why We Can’t Wait (King),
172
Wagner, Emile, 132 Wilkins, Roy, 149, 170, 173,
Wallace, George C., 17, 102, 196
191, 199 on Little Rock crisis, 188
Warren, Earl, 93, 186
on segregation in public Young, Whitney, 149, 196

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OVPWH Civil Rights Move INT 9/21/04 2:14 PM Page 1

Other books in the

The American Civil War

The Civil Rights

Bruce Glassman, Vice President

© 2005 Thomson Gale, a part of The Thomson Corporation.

For more information, contact

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

Cover credit: © Flip Schulke/CORBIS

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Printed in the United States of America

2. Blacks Should Agitate for Civil Rights

3. Booker T. Washington’s Leadership Was Flawed

4. Booker T. Washington’s Leadership Was Effective

5. Civil Rights Can Be Secured Through Mass Action

6. Civil Rights Can Be Secured Through Legal Action

Chapter 2: Segregation or Integration?

2. Segregation Is Necessary by James Jackson Kilpatrick 86

3. School Segregation Is Unconstitutional by Earl Warren 93

4. The Government Should Not Interfere in School

5. Brown v. Board of Education Boosted Civil Rights

6. Brown v. Board of Education Failed to Promote Civil

schools and undermined the long-term effort to remedy

Chapter 3: What Were the Strategies of the Civil Rights

2. Federal Civil Rights Legislation Is Inadequate

3. Blacks Must Employ Nonviolent Resistance

4. Nonviolent Resistance Is Not Enough by Malcolm X 140

5. Blacks Should Strive for Black Power

6. Black Power Is Ineffective by Kenneth Clark 159

7. King’s Protest Campaigns Had a Limited Impact

8. King’s Protest Campaigns Bolstered Civil Rights

Chapter 4: Who Played the Most Important Role in the

2. Grassroots Organizers Played the Most Important

For Further Discussion 201

O n December 2, 1859, several hundred soldiers gathered at the

10 THE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT

Brown had “a perfect right to interfere by force with the slave-

T he civil rights movement that spanned the years following the

The Legacy of Slavery

12 THE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT

The Birth of a Movement

Segregation of white and colored children in public schools

14 THE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT

fects the motivation of a child to learn. Segregation, with the

In nullifying the “separate but equal” doctrine set forth in Plessy

it struck down a particularly overt Jim Crow law that affected

The Pace Quickens

16 THE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT

bus trips were designed to test the implementation of laws that

NAACP office workers in Detroit organize a membership drive in the 1940s.

ers targeted the white terrorism that continued to intimidate

The March on Washington

18 THE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT

rial, where King delivered his now famous “I Have a Dream”

“Bloody Sunday,” thousands of people reconvened and completed

The Rise of Black Nationalism

20 THE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT