Peter B. Levy - The Civil Rights Movement in America: From Black Nationalism to the Womens Political Council

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The Civil Rights
Movement in America

From Black Nationalism to the
Womens Political Council

Peter B. Levy, Editor

Movements of the American Mosaic

Copyright 2015 by ABC-CLIO, LLC

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, except for the inclusion of brief quotations in a review, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

The civil rights movement in America : from Black Nationalism to the Women's Political Council / Peter B. Levy, editor.

pages cm. (Movements of the American mosaic)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 9781610697613 (hard copy : alk. paper) ISBN 9781610697620 (ebook) 1. Civil rights movementsUnited StatesHistoryEncyclopedias. 2. African AmericansCivil rightsHistoryEncyclopedias. 3. Civil rights workersUnited StatesBiographyEncyclopedias. 4. United StatesRace relationsEncyclopedias. I. Levy, Peter B., editor.

E185.61.C6148 2015

323.1196073dc23 2014044237

ISBN: 9781610697613
EISBN: 9781610697620

19 18 17 16 15 1 2 3 4 5

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Introduction

This book traces a heroic struggle for freedom in America, the modern civil rights movement. It takes as its major premise Martin Luther King Jr.s pronouncement that the movement had a vast array of heroes, men and women, old and young, well known and unknown, and that the words and actions of these individuals counted. Or, as he put it in his Letter From Birmingham Jail (1963), one day the South would recognize its real heroes, like James Meredith, who courageously and with a majestic sense of purpose faced jeering and hostile mobs, and like the 72-year-old woman from Montgomery, Alabama, who rose up with a sense of dignity and with her people decided not to ride the segregated buses, and responded to one who inquired about the tiredness with ungrammatical profundity. My feet is tired, but my soul is rested. This book also seeks to display the veracity of Kings argument that the modern civil rights movement stood up for the American dream and the most sacred values of Western culture, that it sought to turn the ideal of the Declaration of Independence and Christian morality into a reality for all of Americas citizens.

The majority of the over 120 entries are biographies of some of the most important men and women who comprised the movement. They were a remarkably varied group. They included Harvard PhDs like Ralph Bunche, who worked closely with Eleanor Roosevelt to craft the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights; to Fannie Lou Hamer, a poor sharecropper from the Mississippi Delta who moved the nation with her gripping testimony on the terrorism she faced for trying to exercise her right to vote. Some, like Ella Baker, worked primarily behind the scenes as a mentor and/or sage; others, like James Meredith, largely marched alone. From James Lawson, who studied the principles of nonviolence in Gandhis India, to H. Rap Brown, who once declared that violence was as American as cherry pie, they neither practiced nor preached the same tactics. But even if they were not always united in terms of their background, tactics, or personalities, collectively they shared a similar goal: to overcome racism and to achieve equality.

A sizable chunk of the entries in this book examine events like the March on Washington, where Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his famous I Have a Dream speech, and the Los Angeles (Watts) Riot of 1965, which made clear that race was a national problem, not just a southern problem. Just as many describe organizations, from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), which had been fighting for equality since the early decades of the twentieth century; to the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, which burst onto the public scene following the sit-ins of 1960. Some of the entries discuss key pieces of legislation, such as the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which enabled millions of blacks to vote for the first time; or court cases, such as Loving v. Virginia, which overturned age-old laws that barred people of different races from marrying one another. Since the movement did not operate in a vacuum, a number of the entries focus on some of the foes of the civil rights movement, such as George Wallace, who proclaimed his defense of segregation forever in his 1963 gubernatorial inaugural address; and the White Citizens Council, which organized to resist racial reform.

This volume also includes a dozen key documents, ranging from the Supreme Courts decision in Brown v. Board of Education, which ruled segregated public education unconstitutional; to excerpts from the FBIs secret file on Malcolm X, which reminds us that the movement had friends as well as foes in the federal government. A number of these documents are laws that still have a profound impact upon how we live. The Civil Rights Act of 1964, for instance, provides the basis for protecting women from sexual harassment in the workplace and in schools. And several of the documents are addresses delivered by the presidents who were in office as the civil rights movement emerged as a major factor in American life. While reading these laws, court cases, and speeches, readers are encouraged to consider why successive presidents of the United States have publicly defended the rights of blacks, whereas for years American leaders had averted doing so.

In order to help readers understand the answer to this question, it is important to have at least some sense of the history of the black struggle for freedom. In almost every way that the status of African Americans can be measured, they were second-class citizens as the United States emerged from World War II. At roughly midcentury, blacks had half the average annual income and twice as high unemployment and poverty rates as whites. While U.S. scientific technology, consumer goods, colleges and universities, and suburban homes were the envy of the world, millions of African Americans continued to battle the age-old problems of inadequate health care, education, and housing. Even blacks who were not poor faced legal and extralegal barriers to full citizenship. In the South, blacks faced a rigid set of Jim Crow laws that limited where they could go to school, eat, recreate, and much more. Only a minority of blacks enjoyed the right to vote, and they were rarely allowed to exercise it in cases that could affect public policies. While blacks who migrated to the North or West, as blacks did in extraordinary numbers in the middle decades of the twentieth century, left behind Jim Crow laws and a society that openly espoused its belief in white supremacy, they found themselves living in segregated neighborhoods and limited by customs and codes in terms of employment and their public lives. Moreover, though African Americans in the North could vote, and on occasion elected black officials, only rarely did whites face the prospect of having African Americans set the laws and policies for majority-white communities. In sum, in the midst of the Cold War, as American leaders touted the freedom of the West versus the tyranny of the East, African Americans were not a free people. As President John F. Kennedy rhetorically observed in a nationally televised address in June 1963: Who among us [meaning whites] would be content to have the color of his skin changed and stand in his [meaning blacks] place?