The United States and Equal Rights, 1947-65

Black Americans to 1957

One movement fighting for change did win victories, because of the tactics it employed and institutions in place. The victories were in the United States and against institutionalized segregation and other discriminations - with the Supreme Court a more powerful institution than local institutionalized racial discriminations.

An advance in integration - the first step in integrating major league baseball - had come in 1947 when Jackie Robinson began playing for the Brooklyn Dodgers. More integration came when President Truman desegregated the military, Korea being the first war that Americans fought with integrated units. And in 1954 black men were receiving commissions as officers.

In the Fifties, blacks were rising in the world of popular entertainment. Count Basie and Nat King Cole were popular. In the mid-fifties Harry Belafonte became a popular singer. Fats Domino was putting songs in the top 40. Little Richard began singing for young white audiences. So too did Big Mama Thorton, with her lively song "Hound Dog." In 1957 Chuck Berry was playing music that appealed to young whites. In the fifties, Diana Ross and the Supremes were on top in music. Eartha Kitt was popular. And Sidney Poitier was a rising movie star. Stars like Nat King Cole and their families experienced bigotry in their white Hollywood, California neighborhood. And regarding the new popularity of rock and roll, a few older whites were upset with Elvis Presley because he was helping to make popular what they called "nigger music." Nevertheless, a shift in attitude by whites toward black people was taking place. Meanwhile, battles over civil rights for blacks had begun.

In 1954 a class action suit on behalf of thirteen families in Topeka Kansas challenged school segregation. A third-grader, Linda Brown, was forbidden to go to school four blocks away, and she had to ride a bus to an all black school five miles away. In a case to be known as Brown versus the Board of Education, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously that racial segregation in public schools was unconstitutional. Many whites in the South believed that doing away with segregation in the schools would lower school standards and demean them. And the battle over school integration in the South was about to begin.

Before the school integration battles began, a forty-two year old woman in Montgomery Alabama, Rosa Parks, created a stir that was also to make its way to the Supreme Court. In December 1955, Rosa Parks was on her way home from her job as a seamstress in a department store. She was riding in the middle of a bus, in seats designated for whites if all the seats in the white section in the front of the bus were taken. A white man boarded the bus and asked that the blacks in the middle of the bus move to the rear so he could take a seat. The blacks around Parks complied, but Parks refused to move. She was tired. She was also a civil rights militant, part-time activist for the local chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), and she drew strength from her religion. The bus driver called the police, who came and took Parks to the police station, where she was fingerprinted and jailed. She called an NAACP lawyer. The city of Montgomery fined Parks, and her lawyer advised her not to pay. Encouraged by Supreme Court's ruling on segregation in public schools, the NAACP wanted to test the constitutionality of segregation in public bussing.

In Montgomery a committee of African-Americans formed to support Parks, a number of them church leaders. They addressed the bussing issue and called themselves the Montgomery Improvement League. One of its members was Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who, the year before, at the age of twenty-four, had become the pastor at the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery. The Montgomery Improvement League convinced blacks to boycott the city's busses and use whatever alternative transportation they could. In late February, three months after the arrest of Parks, the city indicted Dr. King, twenty-four other ministers and a hundred other blacks for conspiring to prevent the bus company from operating its business. Meanwhile, someone - who probably saw himself as a true-blue American - transformed himself into a terrorist by bombing King's home. King's wife and recently born daughter were there. Neither was injured. But it was the beginning of a revival of terrorism in the Deep South.

In early June, 1956, the U.S. District Court ruled that racial segregation of Alabama city bus lines was unconstitutional. The bus boycott continued, and the bus company suffered without the patronage of blacks. As with the Japanese in Hawaii, numbers were proving to be a point of strength. The Supreme Court weighed in and upheld the ruling of the U.S. District Court. And in December the bus company relented. The bus boycott ended. And, on December 26, blacks and whites began riding the buses without forced segregation.

The Montgomery Improvement League had demonstrated a winning strategy. Then in January 1957 from among the losers came more bombings. Three Baptist Churches were bombed, as was the home of a white minister - bombings that would be no more effective in changing the course of history than Germany's bombing of London, or Britain's bombing of Berlin.

Fledgling Integration, 1956 to 1963

In 1956 Autherine Lucy became the first African-American allowed to attend the University of Alabama. In February 1957, Martin Luther King Jr. was elected president of a newly formed group, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. That year, Ghana won its independence from British rule, which may have helped inspire some blacks in the United States. By September 1957 enough support had arisen across the United States for human rights for blacks that Congress passed the Civil Rights Act. That act created a Civil Rights Commission, established a Civil Rights Division in the U.S. Department of Justice and gave the federal government the power to seek court injunctions against obstructions to voting rights. That September, Governor Orval Faubus was being televised as he made a show of trying to prevent school integration in Little Rock, Arkansas, and President Eisenhower reluctantly federalized the Arkansas National Guard. Public schools in Arkansas remained closed for the school year of 1958-59. Faubus' move proved to be show, and when schools reopened the following school year Arkansas was ready to comply with the law regarding integration.

More efforts at integration were attempted. In 1960, some brave souls engaged in lunch-counter sit-ins at the Woolworth Department Store in Greensboro North Carolina. In 1961 Charlayne Hunter and Hamilton Holmes began their studies at the University of Georgia, without incidents of violence. Violence did appear in the spring of 1961 with "Freedom Rides" from Washington D.C. into the South - busses filled with blacks and some whites - their purpose to challenge desegregated interstate bussing in the South. Local law enforcement in Alabama allowed people to attack the busses and people in the busses. In Montgomery a crowd waiting for the bus targeted one of the white riders and crippled him for life. In Jackson Mississippi the "freedom riders" were imprisoned for forty to sixty days, but on the issue of civil rights, the rides were a success. In November, largely as a result of the Freedom Rides, the Interstate Commerce Commission banned segregation on interstate buses, trains and supporting facilities.

In December, Martin Luther King was in Albany Georgia helping to fight for integrated public facilities. And in 1962 came the well-publicized enrollment of James Meredith at the university called Ol' Miss. In 1963, the nation watched the struggle for civil rights shift back to Birmingham, Alabama. There, in May, school children joined the demonstrations, and the Police Commissioner, Eugene "Bull" Conner, used police dogs and fire hoses against the demonstrators - all of it displayed for the world on television. Many people across the nation sided with the demonstrators. The segregationists in the South were losing the battle for hearts and minds. And on May 20 the Supreme Court ruled that Birmingham's segregation ordinances were unconstitutional.

In June 1963, the leader of the Jackson, Mississippi, chapter of the NAACP, Medgar Evers, was gunned down at his home, and that year four little girls were killed in the bombing of a church in Birmingham, Alabama. In 1963 tensions existed across the United States. Blacks sat-in in California's capital, Sacramento, and they sat-in in Detroit's city hall. In New York they dumped garbage on City Hall Plaza. Blacks clashed with police in Chicago at a cemetery that refused to bury African Americans. In Philadelphia African- Americans clashed with police at a construction site. The Department of Justice, headed by Robert Kennedy, was keeping track of the demonstrations, and that summer it counted 758 across the nation and the arrest of 13,786 demonstrators in seventy-five cities.

It was in late August 1963 that King made his "I have a dream" speech before a great gathering at the nation's capital. And it was around this time that Governor George Wallace of Alabama stood at a schoolhouse door as he had promised in his political campaign the year before. He had declared "Segregation now, Segregation tomorrow and segregation forever." But it was just more show. Immediately after his demonstration he stepped aside and let federal marshals proceed with registration for classes.

1964: Human Rights, New Divisions and Riots

In November 1963, President Kennedy was assassinated. The new president, Lyndon Baines Johnson, championed new civil rights legislation, a bill addressing voting rights and desegregation of public schools. A leading Republican, Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona, favored equal opportunity but not by government fiat. In effect he was opposed to minority rights protected by law, and he claimed that civil rights legislation went against the nation's Constitution. He voted against the legislation, winning favor from Southern segregationists. But numerous Republicans stuck with the Republican party's traditional support for civil rights, and with Republican support the Civil Rights Act passed through Congress, and it was called the most far reaching civil rights legislation since Reconstruction.

In May 1964, Martin Luther King was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Then, during the summer, white and black students went to Mississippi to work with the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in voter registration drives, in what was called "Freedom Summer." Three young men who were traveling together - Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman and James Chaney - disappeared, and their disappearance made headlines. Six weeks later their bodies were discovered in a shallow grave. This too would not slow down the civil rights movement.

A few blacks made demands for such things as reparations to African-Americans for three hundred years of unpaid labor as slaves. There were calls for police review boards that included African-Americans. In New York City a group led by Isiah Brunson made these demands and called for strikes by blacks against landlords. Brunson threatened to disrupt the World's Fair by stall-ins on roads, and he threatened to disrupt the city's subway system. This challenged the forces of law and order. New York's police were mobilized, and Brunson's threat proved empty.

The issue over integrating neighborhoods was heating up, and however much public opinion had been instrumental in advancing civil rights, there was in the North and West of the country, as well as the South, a great number of people who feared that "too much, too fast" would lead to disorder. In California, being for Civil Rights had been popular during the late Fifties and the through the first part of the Sixties - inspired by the battles in the South. But, when the fight for integration came closer to home, attitudes among many whites changed. In California in 1964, voters rejected 2 to 1 a proposed law to ban discrimination in the sale or rental of housing. There were whites in California who were saying that they did not want some "noisy Negro family" living next door to them. Some said they were uncomfortable with the idea of their daughter dating a black. And some whites complained the blacks ought to remain focused on "consolidating their recent gains."

Fears of integration by northern whites were enhanced by the migration of blacks in recent years. Between 1940 and 1960 the black populations of Chicago and Detroit had tripled, and in Los Angeles it had multiplied by five. Whites feared that their neighborhoods might be overwhelmed by blacks. Whites imagined their neighborhoods becoming like the poor, dilapidated and high crime neighborhoods that they imagined black neighborhoods to be. Whites were concerned about the drop in value of the investment they were making in their homes and property. People in affluent Beverly Hills, California, had no such fears, and Beverly Hills was to be among the first cities to outlaw segregation in housing.

In the summer of 1964 the issue of integration was exacerbated by rioting. It began in New York's Harlem with the killing a fifteen year-old black: James Powell. The boy had a criminal past but was trying to advance himself by attending summer school. Outside the school, an apartment superintendent was washing down the sidewalk and was annoyed by the presence of Powell and boys with him, and he turned his hose on them. The boys responded to the insult by attacking the superintendent, chasing him into retreat. According to the police, Powell had a knife drawn and an off-duty police lieutenant who happened upon the scene ordered Powell to drop the knife. Powell did not, and, according to the police, Powell attacked the officer. The lieutenant is reported to have responded as police are trained to do when dealing with someone with a knife, he defended himself with his pistol. Powell died. Angry blacks, mainly young people, demonstrated, and the police ordered them to disperse. Unhappy with the police, people threw bottles and bricks at them from rooftops. Television crews, protected by the presence of police, were there to catch the sensational events, and television helped spread the riots - to Brooklyn's Bedford Stuyvesant district, to Rochester, Philadelphia, Chicago and northern New Jersey. Windows were broken. Stores were looted. Black as well as white policemen were assaulted. Various African-American leaders, such as Dr. King, A. Philip Randolph and Roy Wilkens, denounced the rioting as ineffective and damaging to the move towards equality. But, as with Gandhi's movement in India, many of the aggrieved were more emotional and volatile than were those leaders who advocated non-violence.

Malcolm X

Martin Luther King Jr. was not so popular among African-Americans in his day as he would be in the decades following his assassination. Some blacks did not care to seek favor from whites and were uninterested in being liked by whites. And they had no more desire to mix with whites than many whites had to mix with blacks. Among those hostile to King's movement was Malcolm X. In 1963, Malcolm X described King as a white man in his thinking, and he described black integrationists as "bourgeois." Malcolm was then a member of the Nation of Islam, led by Elijah Muhammad. All Christians, said Malcolm, were white in their thinking. Christianity, he said, was a white religion. And "white people," he told the author Alex Haley, "are born devils by nature." Malcolm claimed that the only one leader who had the qualifications necessary to unite all elements of black people in America was the Honorable Elijah Muhammad. And with every point that Malcolm X made he referred to the "Honorable Elijah Muhammad."

Pronouncements by Malcolm X got a lot of attention in the press, and he became a speaker in great demand. His sassing whites and his call for freedom "by any means necessary" appealed to many African-Americans. King, in turn, denounced "extremist leaders who preach revolution" but were "unwilling to lead what would certainly end in bloody, chaotic and total defeat."

Then Malcolm journeyed abroad, and he went on the pilgrimage (hajj) to Mecca. In Mecca he saw all races coming together in praise of Allah. Malcolm embraced a more standard form of Islam, and in 1964, after returning to the United States, he spoke of all races being the creation of God and all races being able to live together in peace as equals. He said he had forgotten the bad things that other black leaders had said about him, and he said that he prayed that they also forgot "the many bad things I've said about them." A reconciliation between King and Malcolm X seemed in the making.

Malcolm X had been unhappy with Elijah Muhammad's opposition to members of the Nation of Islam participating in politics and protests. And Malcolm left the Black Muslims, taking a number of Black Muslims with him, who became a part of Malcolm's independent organization. And Malcolm became to the Nation of Islam what Trotsky had been to Stalin.

Malcolm received numerous death threats at his office and his home. He announced that he was a marked man. Black Muslims followed him, and Malcolm was convinced that the Black Muslims intended to kill him. Instead of retreating, Malcolm went public with an attack on Elijah Muhammad for sexual dalliances and for having fathered eight illegitimate children. One of Nation of Islam's rising leading activists, Louis Farrakhan, is reported to have said that Malcolm was "worthy of death." Malcolm's group kept members of the Nation of Islam at bay with guns. Then on February 21, 1965, at the Audubon Ballroom in Harlem, a group of black men gunned down Malcolm. Members of the Nation of Islam were tried and convicted of Malcolm's murder, but they claimed innocence. And some blacks were to believe that Malcolm's death was a conspiracy that included the Central Intelligence Agency and the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Los Angeles, Summer of 1965

Unemployment was high among blacks in Los Angeles. There was even some hunger, to the extent that some embarrassed women, dressed like the poor persons they were and looking quite plain, were selling themselves at the corner of Washington and Jefferson Boulevards in downtown Los Angeles - alongside a few women in their heels and tight dresses and professional manner. The plain-looking women at Washington and Jefferson were after food for their children, while all of them had to worry about the police, who made period sweeps in the area.

Some whites were saying that if one could not afford children, one should not have children. But to poor black women this was an odious and racist idea. They believed they had as much right to have children as middleclass and upper-class white folks.

Meanwhile, white policemen in Los Angles were not pleased to have duty in black neighborhoods. Aggrieved people were often unpleasant toward outsiders with authority. And in these times blacks were more inclined to feel free to express their anger. And it was anger that the police found one hot August day in 1965 when they were having difficulty arresting a man for drunk driving. A crowd gathered, many not knowing the origins of the confrontation. An officer thought that a woman spit on him and was trying to arrest her. And the crowd erupted.

An angry crowd does not always hit at targets that are at the center of their grievances, and so it was with this crowd. The crowd grew and began throwing rocks and bottles at passing cars, including cars driven by other blacks. More police arrived and squared off against the demonstrators, into the night.

News of the eruption spread, and blacks several miles away in the community known as Watts began demonstrating. In Watts, rock throwing young blacks faced-off against police with riot sticks, and the rioting in Watts spread. The police withdrew, hoping that this would calm the community. Instead, the demonstrators erupted in joy, believing that they had won a victory over their oppressors. They overturned the trucks belonging to television crews. Cab drivers returning blacks to their community had to run to escape beatings, and not all of them escaped.

With the police not around, some in Watts felt free to start looting, and the smashing of windows and invasions of businesses began. Alongside the urge to possess was the urge to destroy, and they repeated the slogan of a local disc jockey: "burn baby burn!" Fires spread. Arriving firemen were shot at. Then fireman refused to respond without police escort. Black storeowners put up signs in their shop windows, describing themselves as "blood brothers." But their shops were destroyed with the others. The comedian Dick Gregory arrived and tried to convince the celebrating people that they should go home, and he was shot, receiving only a minor wound.

On the third day of the riots in Watts, 1,500 National Guardsmen arrived. They were too few, and on the fourth day 2,000 more arrived. Soon their number reached 13,000, and on seventh day the rioting ended. Thirty-four people had died, most of them people from the community. More than 1,000 people had been injured. Around 200 buildings had been totally destroyed and an estimated 400 had been severely damaged.

Nothing had been accomplished but the venting of emotion. Photos remained of scared police aggressively attacking people. Governor (Pat) Brown, with an entourage, walked the streets of Watts, wondering no doubt what he could do to improve conditions there. And someone shouted to him, calling him whitey and saying, "We don't need you no more.

Additional Online Reading

Brown V. Board of Education: A Civil Rights Milestone and Its Troubled Legacy,
by James T. Patterson, 2001

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