The Era of the Movements for Civil Rights, 1941-

1973…and Beyond?

On the Need for the Civil Rights Movement

To propose a discussion of the civil rights movement presupposes a knowledge in the student of why there was a need for a civil rights movement in the first place – as a history professor who has been in the trenches for many years, I know better than to suppose that anything in particular was absorbed in high school, and that I’s generally best to assume no knowledge on a given topic and start from scratch whenever possible. So let’s quickly take a gander first at the necessity for the most prominent of the various movements for civil rights, the African Americanmovement, and then briefly touch on the backdrop to the women’s, Native American, Puerto Rican American, Chicano, and LGBT rights movements.

THE BACKDROP TO THE AFRICAN-AMERICAN MOVEMENT

Prior to the Civil War, citizenship was restricted to whites, the vote was held by propertied men with white skin, and the slave population in the South stood at appr. 4 million. Although the war formally ended slavery with the 13th

Amendment to the Constitution, simple freedom was not enough -- tremendous challenges still faced the freedmen of the South. The period of Reconstruction (1865-1872) was a time wherein the South was rebuilt physically, politically, and socially. During this time the United States government exerted great effort in attempting to ensure civil rights for blacks. The 14th and 15th Amendments, respectively, gave the rights of citizenship to blacks, as well as other non-whites; and the right to vote. But there was great resistance to these changes, not least by such terrorist organizations as the Ku Klux Klan, who rose up to champion white supremacy in the South by attacking both blacks and white Republicans who were actively working in the South to enforce the new racial and socio-political order.

This terrorism was so severe that the federal government saw no choice but to use the military to counter its attacks, and so the South was divided into five military districts – this lasted through 1876 and the end of Reconstruction. At that time a deal was reached between the Democratic Party (strongest in the South) and the Republican Party (dominant in the North) to terminate the military occupation, and let the southern states manage their own internal affairs – happy day, thought the South! The nation, frankly worn out after what seemed by this time like nearly twenty years of civil war, was largely thrilled to move forward, and so southern blacks were left to the not-so-tender mercies of their former masters. Needless to say they were neither happy, nor thrilled.

From the 1880s through 1910, southern states drafted and ratified new constitutions to establish a socio-political order to suit a new paradigm of white supremacy: blacks and poor whites largely lost the power to vote through a variety of clever strategies such as literacy tests, grandfather clauses, poll taxes, and outright intimidation and fraud which made it essentially impossible to qualify, but to be even more specific, by 1950, only about 20% of eligible African-American voters in the South were registered to vote…and for more than a half century there had been no one in southern government at the local, state, or federal level to speak directly for the interests of the black populace.

This was the era of the “Solid South,” when the Democrats ruled supreme.Rule by Democrats and rule by whites were synonymous. Blacks were kept in place not only through the “Jim Crow” laws that made up the system of segregation but through the omnipresent threat of violence, up to and including lynching. In 1896 the Supreme Court decision Plessy v. Ferguson maintained that it was unclear which rights were actually covered by the Fourteenth Amendment, and at any rate the government could not force citizens to commingle; in addition, so long as facilities for both blacks and whites were “equal” in quality,

it was lawful that they be “separate,” because segregation laws did not imply the inferiority of either race. The reality, of course, was that under segregation southern facilities would ALWAYS be separate and very, very rarely be equal. One of the difficulties in effecting any real change at the federal legislative level during this period -- even supposing the will been there -- was that the southern bloc of congressmen controlled many of the most important committees in Congress and so were able to defeat bills dealing with issues such as lynching.

So by the late 1940s-early 1950s, the situation for African-Americans was that they were oppressed in a variety of ways: racial segregation; lack of political participation and representation; economic exploitation; physical violence and mental and emotional terrorism. But it’s important to stress that they were not passive victims, or not ALL of them were. There were many ways to resist, and the best organized resistance began with the creation of the Niagara Movement in New York in 1905. Spearheaded by W.E.B. Du Bois, who had called for a “talented tenth” of educated blacks to come up with new ways to advance the cause of black equality in the United States, the Movement issued the Niagara Principles, demanding full voting rights; an end to segregation; equal treatment in the justice system; and equal opportunity in jobs, education, health care, and military service. This became the blueprint for all civil rights struggles from that point forward, and resulted, in part, in the following year in the formation of the NAACP (National for the Advancement of Colored Peoples), which would fight up through the present day using lawsuits, education, and political pressure to try and effect positive change.

W.E.B. Du Bois

Greenwood district, Tulsa, Oklahoma, 1921

It’s also important as we briefly visit New York to make note of the fact that blacks faced problems outside of the South as well. If things were better, and more African-Americans could vote, participate in politics, and there was far less segregation, nonetheless, whites lived more and more on the edges of cities or in the suburbs, while blacks lived in the older, inner-city areas, or ghettos where high rents, low wages, and weak city services were the norm. The great majority of blacks only had access to menial, lower class jobs, and even those with college educations often had difficulty in finding employment in areas for which they were they were qualified.

So how did the civil rights movement start when it did? Well, it was a long time coming, simmering away, like a crock pot on the back burner of the stove, largely unnoticed by the majority of Americans until it finally boiled over. But the indications were there, every step of the way. 350,000 blacks had fought in World War I, and even more had supported the effort on the home front by working in the defense industries of the North. This service,

and the larger paychecks that came along with it, brought about greater pride, and African Americans carried this pride back with them to their hometowns, often in the South, where their new attitudes did not go over well with local whites; inevitable violence ensued, some of it epic in proportion. Nine whites and forty blacks died in rioting in East St. Louis, Illinois in 1917; an alleged rape pinned on blacks incited white violence in Tulsa, Oklahoma in 1921, and whites burned thirty-five blocks of the black-populated Greenwood area of town, incidentally killing several dozen people, both white and black, as they went. And the town of Rosewood, Florida, was literally destroyed, it vanished from the face of the map, after whites burned it to the ground.

The New Deal did many good things for most lower-class Americans, but was possessed of several blind spots as regards the interests of African Americans, in spite of the fact that President Franklin Roosevelt had a group of black advisers known as the “Black Brain Trust” to advise him on the specific issues confronting African-Americans during the Depression. Social Security and Wagner Act benefits did not extend to domestic and agricultural jobs which employed most black workers at this time, and President Roosevelt refused to put his support behind a federal anti-lynching bill for fear that if he did so, the southern bloc of Congressmen would then refuse to support any of his other initiatives for the remainder of his presidency, effectively hamstringing his power as at that time a great part of the power of the Democratic Party (his party) was in the “Solid South.” The irony of the Democratic Party in the 1930s and 1940s was that the most racially conservative Americans and the most racially liberal Americans coexisted within the same party, as many northern Democrats were increasingly dedicated to racial equality.

During World War II, more Americans served in uniform than ever before – over 15 million men and women. Yet only African Americans were segregated from other troops, and assigned primarily menial duties. The NAACP protested this, arguing that a “Jim Crow army cannot fight for a free world,” but to no avail. And wartime job and housing shortages led to racial conflict breaking out in over one hundred cities in 1943.

There were 15 million blacks in the country at the end of World War II, 10 percent of the nation’s population; they made up 30-50 percent of the population of several southern states. In 1950 two-thirds of all African-Americans lived in the South, and their lives were largely defined by the grim conditions outlined above. The only way to address this was to restore the moral and legal authority of the Constitution which, in this one area, had been allowed to decay since the late 1800s, mainly because no one really knew how to maintain it. But blacks knew that something had to, and would, give, and their newfound sense of activism was ample evidence of this – the NAACP grew nine times larger during the war years, to over 450,000 members, and in 1942 CORE, the Congress of Racial Equality was established in Chicago.

By the mid-1950s, the civil rights movement would be underway.

THE BACKDROP TO THE WOMEN’S MOVEMENT

One could begin, somewhat broadly, with this – women are the original oppressed minority group, going back as far as we HAVE any recorded history, whether it be written or oral, but that would presuppose women as the statistical minority throughout history, and that is something that is difficult to determine from one society to another. What remains conclusive, however, is that, in the words of James Brown, it has been a “man’s, man’s, man’s world” throughout history, and women have been the secondary sex in terms of most forms of power. Certainly Aristophanes’ great comedy Lysistrata could riff cleverly and at length on the battle of the sexes and the power that women had in the bedroom, and how that power could be used to achieve nearly anything, including an end to war, but in practical terms until relatively recently women have been able to exercise precious little power of any kind whatsoever in industrial societies or most societies that have achieved the level of sophistication of a city-state (tribal societies are something else altogether, and something for which we have no time).

In American history, that is to say since the ratification of the Constitution in 1787, women possessed little economic or political power. When married, “two became one,” a union which effectively erased the woman’s identity, giving her the name of her husband, and also generally bestowing all control of any wealth or property she might own (rare) or inherit (somewhat less rare) on her husband, regardless of his trustworthiness or character. A woman had no right to seek a divorce on her own – a man could, to be sure, but a woman? Dangerously emotional, was the general consensus, and not to be trusted with so important a decision – which was the biggest part of the argument against giving women the right to

control property, wealth, or a vote. A woman could repeatedly show evidence of beatings, broken limbs, etc, and local law enforcement would respond with, “Now Mabel, you know Jeb just gets worked up sometimes but he loves you more’n bees love honey – so jest get along home now –here’s a stick to use as a crutch – and don’t give him any back-talk, everything’ll be fine.”

To be sure, some of this began to change in the western territories and states in the early 1800s, where character and backbone, “sand” or “true grit,” as they called it, was how people judged one another – gender and background mattered less there and what mattered more was simply WHO YOU WERE and HOW YOU CONDUCTED YOURSELF. This is where voting rights began to expand, as well as economic rights, and for some small number of women, by the 1830s, there were improvements – but only on a case-by-case basis, there was no real change in the air as far as state legislatures rewriting their laws to equalize things for the fairer sex as far as economic or voting rights.

However, by 1840 it was the abolition movement that was rattling the cage of conservative American assumptions. Abolitionist women were violating social mores by speaking to mixed audiences of men and women, and Angelina Grimke utilized the principles of the Enlightenment to argue in favor of women deserving the same civic rights as men:

“It is a woman’s right to have a voice in all the laws and

regulations by which she is governed, whether in Church or

State…The present arrangements of society on these

points are a violation of human rights, a rank usurpation of

power, a violent seizure of what is sacredly and inalienably

hers.”

Further, these abolitionist women believed that a traditional marriage was a kind of domestic slavery for a woman; as Ernestine Rose said, “The radical difficulty is that women are considered as belonging to men.”

Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton

Women began to win some concessions on the economic front in such states as Mississippi, Maine, and Massachusetts – fathers were worried about irresponsible husbands frittering away their bequests to their daughters, and husbands wanted to place property in their wife’s names to protect against bankruptcy seizures. The great victory finally came in New York in 1848 when women were granted total legal control over any property they brought into a marriage – within a matter of years, fourteen other states had passed similar laws.

And it was in this same year that Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton organized the Seneca Falls Convention in upstate New York. One hundred delegates of both sexes met to discuss the issue of women’s rights in the United States, and ultimately drafted a document entitled the Declaration of Sentiments. Modeled on the Declaration of Independence and even making use of some of Jefferson’s most famous phraseology, the reformers stated that they would use “the State and National legislatures, and endeavor to enlist the pulpit and the press” in their struggle to achieve equality for women. The Declaration was dismissed by many, including many more conservative women, but it nonetheless helped to further usher in new reforms – in 1860 New York passed another progressive law allowing women to control their own wages, and to own property acquired by trade, business, labors, or services; in addition, if widowed, they were given sole guardianship of their children.

Women’s rights advocates rejoiced at the passage of the Fifteenth Amendment, thinking it would give them the vote as well as blacks – but this was not to be the case, and many black activists even thought that women’s suffrage activists were being “selfish” in raising a ruckus over their issue when clearly the issue of the day was the enfranchisement of the black man. “When woman, because they are women, are hunted down…dragged from their homes, and hung upon lamp posts, then they will have an urgency to obtain the ballot equal to our own,” Frederick Douglass argued. Many women suffragists decided that they should back down on their protests and wait a while longer for their moment, while others were outraged at the thought that they should be denied even one day further – this disagreement over strategy split the women’s rights movement into two separate organizations, the American Woman Suffrage Association (AWSA) and the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA).

The above split only lasted for some twenty-one years, and in 1890 the two groups reunited; with renewed unity came renewed purpose, and by 1913, most states west of the Mississippi had amended their constitutions to give women the right to vote – but a constitutional amendment was still the main goal; this was one of the primary agendas of the Progressive Movement for most of its twenty-year history, and when it was finally accomplished in 1920 with the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution, it was perceived as the zenith of Progressivism’s achievements. In addition, by the 1910s the vote was no longer the sole focus of the women’s rights – full economic, political, and social equality was the order of the day.

In the 1930s there was great hope amongst women reformers that the New Deal would create great change for American women, not least because Eleanor Roosevelt was the most influential and popular First Lady in American history and was so active in her husband’s administration. But their hopes were doomed (largely) to disappointment. Women continued to work for a lower minimum wage than men, and only 7 percent of the workers hired by the Civil Works Administration were female, while the Civilian Conservation Corps gave no opportunities to women at all. But this also seemed to reflect the tenor of

mainstream American thought at the time –a Gallup poll of 1936 asked respondents if wives should work outside the homes while their husbands had jobs; 82 percent said no –astonishingly, in the 1930s many states even had laws on the books (although they were seldom enforced) prohibiting women from working at all!

And so it was – the majority of women whose husbands worked did stay at home, but when more than 14 million men went into the service in World War II, it opened 8 million job opportunities for women, and the expansion of the economy as a result of

the war kept many of those women employed even in the post-war years – appr. 2 million remained at their jobs once the war was over. Many women left their jobs and went back to hearth and home once the war was over, but quite a few of them were not entirely satisfied with their station in life.

In the ‘50s there were a great many magazines published for women, and all of them conveyed a direct message – take care of the house, husband, and kids, be happy, and make sure you look like Doris Day. All the time, every day, morning, noon, and night. These magazines were most popular in the suburbs, where housewives spent a great deal of time alone, cut off to a large degree from other women, many of them thinking more and more about the reality of their lives. Betty Friedan was a college graduate who had lived in Greenwich Village and written for a leftist union newspaper after college. After she got married, she and her husband moved to the suburbs, and away from events and ideas. Entirely cut off from her old life, she felt like something was missing – her life was both full and empty, and she found herself asking the same recurring question: Is this all there is?

Friedan decided to do some writing, hopefully for publication, to think through her feelings about the way her life had changed, and she decided that if she could make more than it would cost to hire a maid, then she would keep at it. She pitched ideas to editors (all male) about profiles of up-and-coming

American women and was told repeatedly that women only wanted to read articles about how to be better wives and mothers. She was asked to do a piece on the 15-year reunion of the Smith College (her alma mater, and a leading women’s college) graduating class of 1942, and devised a questionnaire to try and find out what these women thought about their lives, and in their answers she found versions of her own experience, and realized she should not have denied her feelings, she should have dealt with them.

Friedan proposed an article, “The Togetherness Woman,” that would explore the both full and empty lives of these women, and at magazine after magazine she was turned down. Soon, she began to realize that what she was interested in writing about was something the women’s magazines had to deny in order to continue to make money. Happily, she was able to get a publishing house interested in the idea, and then began her research in earnest. She discovered that 1949 was the turning point: until then, women’s magazines conveyed the sense that women were moving up and forward, gaining, slowly but surely, parity with men in American life. After that, everything changed. Women no longer exist-

ed on their own, but only in relation to their home, husbands, and children. The more she read, the more she realized that the magazines had constructed and consistently reinforced a fantasy world that never really existed.

Friedan talked about “The Problem That Has No Name”:

"The problem lay buried, unspoken, for many years in the minds of American women. It was a strange stirring, a sense

of dissatisfaction, a yearning [that is, a longing] that women suffered in the middle of the 20th century in the United

States. Each suburban [house]wife struggled with it alone. As she made the beds, shopped for groceries … she was

afraid to ask even of herself the silent question — 'Is this all?"

Friedan argued that women were no less able than men when it came to work or career, regardless of what educators, psychologists, and the mass media might say; the roles these latter defined for women were those in which the restrictions of the past had trapped women. After the publication of The Feminine Mystique in 1963, women began to lobby for the reform of existing traditions and laws that restricted woman’s rights, and the book’s influence was largely responsible for the “second wave” of the women’s right movement.

The women’s movement had simmered down during the primary years of the black civil rights movement, but there were still issues being kept alive, primarily by working women, such as maternity leave and equal pay for equal work – it was largely through their efforts that the Equal Pay Act was passed in 1963. There were greater numbers of women working than ever before in the early 1960s – by 1970 40 percent of married women and 30 percent of mothers with young children were employed, but they had to deal with what was termed the “double day” – at the end of an eight-hour workday, they still had to deal with all of the time-consuming demands of being a wife and mother.

Betty Friedan had seen the future – the constraints of domesticity she had written about were diminishing. With the help of the birth control pill (legalized in 1960) women were having less children, and as states reformed divorce laws, more women were seeking divorces. In 1961 President Kennedy created the Presidential Commission on the Status of Women, whose 1963 report revealed widespread job employment and educational discrimination. As a result of this the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was amended by Congress to include the word sex in the language describing prohibitions against discrimination. In order to advance the cause of women, Betty Friedan and other women’s rights activists founded the National Organization for Women (NOW) in 1966, a civil rights organization for women intended to bring “women into full participation in American society…exercising all the privileges and responsibilities thereof in equal partnership with men.”

Betty Friedan, wiping a symbolic tear from the eye of Abraham Lincoln who, as many feminists argued, had failed to free the “original slaves” -- women

So – the first two civil rights movements in the history of the United States were those of the women, and the blacks, and certainly THE great issue of the mid-twentieth century in American history was that of the African-American struggle for civil rights, but there were other non-white minority groups who, inspired by the example of the black movement, launched their own efforts to win recognition for the problems confronting their particular ethnic groups.

THE BACKDROP TO THE NATIVE AMERICAN’S MOVEMENT

Native Americans were what might be termed the “original oppressed minority group” in U.S. history. Before African slavery existed in any significant numbers…before any Mexicanos could complain about discrimination or land dispossession…before there were even very many women to be treated like second-class citizens…there were Indians, and they were the victims of violence, murder, and attempted enslavement. Within a century of the beginnings of British colonization in what would become the United States, many Indian peoples had suffered population losses of 70-90 percent – and while this was primarily the result of unconscious exposure to Old World germs, it doesn’t change the end result, which is not simply the loss of all of those lives, but the inability of the remaining populations to maintain their cultures and their control of their hereditary territories. And face facts, folks – no matter the legitimacy of any group’s complaints about how American history has done them wrong – there is no single group with as large a gripe as the Native

Americans. The whole continent used to belong to them and they lost EVERYTHING. Well over 90% of their population…whole tribes, cultures, languages, knowledge bases, exterminated forever.

In 1881 Helen Hunt Jackson published A Century of Dishonor, which detailed the previous hundred year’s worth of broken treaties on the part of state and federal government in relation to the Native Americans of the United States. By this time all of the Indians east of the Mississippi River had either seen their land holdings reduced to next to nothing (compared to what they once controlled), or they had been forced to

emigrate to what in the mid-1800s was called “Indian Territory” and what is now referred to as Oklahoma, where small reservations had been carved out of the frontier by the federal government to suit the needs of each tribe. In addition, the Indian Wars of 1869-1889, which effectively ended all Indian resistance to American control west of the Mississippi, were nearing their end, after which said Indians would all have been forced onto reservations.

The federal government was deeply troubled over the future of the Indians, and were advised by reformers that the primary goal had to be changing the hearts and minds of the next generation in order to best effect assimilation –if children were left in the homes of their parents, they would remain purely “Indians.” But if taken from their families and enrolled in off-reservation boarding schools they could be acculturated and turned into “Americans,” albeit Americans of Indian descent. It was no easy task to take children away from their families, but the parents had no power to prevent the will of the federal government with the power of the Army behind it. The end result of these dislocations was the creation of young adult Indians (the term “Native American” would not be coined until the 1960s) who did not truly belong anywhere – most of those trying to make their way in mainstream American society would find that whites were not entirely comfortable around them, no matter how well they might speak English and “fit in,” and long periods of time away from their families and people created a distance that could never really be bridged again.

At the same time life on the reservations was grim – most Indian agents were corrupt, and so the majority of money and supplies from the federal government never reached the reservations. Indian tribes were supposed to become self-sufficient on the lands “given” to them by the government, but quite often the lands were the worst lands that no one else wanted, and not really capable of producing a crop or sustaining herds, reducing once healthy and prosperous (according to their own standards) peoples to living in malnourished poverty. Indian leaders attempting to sort out their problems through the proper legal channels found themselves caught in a bewildering maze of local, state, and federal laws, tangled up with however many treaties (often mutually contradictory) their people may have signed over the years; finally, in 1903 the Supreme Court ruledthat Congress could make any Indian policies it chose, and ignore all prior existing treaties, and in addition Indians were not citizens of the United States unless Congress specifically granted those rights on a given individual – as of that time, and until the 1930s, the Indians as a group would be considered wards of the government.

The Dawes Severalty Act of 1887 only made things worse, although it’s a classic example of the best intentions going awry. The Indian Rights Association leader, Henry Dawes, believed the reservation system was no good, and that only by dividing each reservation into homesteads (like those of white farmers) could Indians be brought to a sense of “personal independence,” andweaned away from their sense of “tribal identity.” But officials within the Bureau of Indian Affairs, through a careless implementation of the land divisions, ended up with 15 million “surplus” acres left over by 1894 – which allowed for the creation of a brand new territory, Oklahoma, and a famous “land rush” (where prospective settlers literally lined up their horses and wagons and raced for the best pieces of land) that made greedy speculators fabulously wealthy. By the time all of this was concluded Indian tribes had lost 66% of the small amount of land that had been allotted to them in so-called “Indian Territory.”

The starting line at left, and above, the “rush” for land in Oklahoma –no, SERIOUSLY.

John Collier and unidentified tribal leaders of the Blackfeet nation, 1934

By the 1930s things were dire for the American Indian. The Great Depression was in full swing and the majority of American had been affected adversely, but in 1934, for example, the average American income was $1600 – whereas the average income for an Indian was $48, and the unemployment rate amongst Indians was three times as high as the national average. But there’s an old Indian saying: “The sun shines even after the worst storms.” Happily, the sun was finally shining for the Indian peoples of the United States in 1933 when FDR appointed John Collier as the commissioner of the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Collier, in the words of

James Henretta, “Understood what Native Americans had long known: that the government’s decades-long policy of forced assimilation, prohibition of Indian religions, and confiscation of Indian lands had left most tribes poor, isolated, and without basic self-determination.” Collier was a fierce critic of the past practices of the BIA to the point of actually advocating for the Agency’s acting as a vehicle for the partial transformation of American life in general through the use of Indian societies as a model for improvement –this was clearly all a bit too much, but it goes a long way in helping one to understand how passionate and true Collier was in his efforts to help in the recovery of the various Indian peoples.

Through his advocacy Congress passed the Indian Reorganization Act, often referred to as the “Indian New Deal,” which reversed the Dawes Act of 1887, allowing Indians to not only reintegrate their lands into communal holdings, but also to create their own tribal governments complete with written constitutions and democratically elected tribal councils. 181 tribes accepted the new policy, while 77 declined it, because

they wished to continue to make their decisions according to consensus rather than by majority vote. The new law also reversed the policy of treating the Indians as wards of the state, and gave them citizenship status. With all this being said, there were so many differences amongst the 258 Indian peoples of the United States that no one law, no matter how well written, could ever hope to satisfy all of their needs/desires, and Collier angered many of them by making choices that did not suit their circumstances. Still and all, for the majority of Indians, the Indian New Deal and John Collier’s thirteen-year stint as BIA commissioner was the first good news they’d had in an awfully long time.

But by the 1960s, the days of John Collier seemed like an eternity ago. America was the wealthiest nation in the history of the world, and almost none of that wealth had made its way to the reservations of the Indians. With a population of 800,000, their unemployment levels had risen to ten times the national average, and in nearly every social index they were at the bottom – access to adequate housing, schools, and medical facilities; levels of addiction, whether it be to alcohol or drugs; suicide rates. As many observed, the reservations resembled nothing more than rural ghettoes, blighted neighborhoods populated by people existing below the poverty level with no hope and nothing for which to live. It was these problems that the National Congress of American Indians, a conservative group, seemed too conservative to deal with, which led, inevitably, to challenges from younger, more progressive organizations influenced by the black civil rights movement and the later Black Power movement: The National Indian Youth Council (NIYC), and their dream of uniting all Indian peoples under one ethnic banner in order to present a united front to the federal government; and two more militant groups, Indians of All Tribes (IAT) and the American Indian Movement (AIM).

THE BACKDROP TO THE PUERTO RICAN-AMERICAN’S MOVEMENT

Puerto Rican-Americans in the northeastern part of the country faced the same general constellation of de jure and de facto discrimination that their Mexican-American cousins dealt with in the Southwest, the only difference being that Puerto Ricans did not have to deal with the theft of their lands and other property.

The Young Lords started as a street gang, and in 1968 were reorganized into a civil rights movement by Jose “Cha Cha” Jimenez – within one year the organization had spread to more than thirty cities (primarily in the northeast), with protection of the poor from unfair evictions and other urban abuses, the oversight of police aggression, and Puerto Rican self-determination as their main ideological rallying points.

To draw national attention to the problems faced by the Latino poor in the inner cities, the Young Lords relied upon confrontational tactics such as occupying and ransacking the Office of Urban Renewal in Chicago, as well as other similar institutions – in all instances, there was no attempts to resist arrests so as to avoid bloodshed and negative publicity. The Young Lords set up community service programs in association with local churches, and also established “Garbage Offensives” to clean up neighborhoods underserved by city sanitation officials, as well as addressing such issues as better Latino education, health care, tenant’s rights, and free breakfasts and day care for children.

"If the People of El Salvador can ask for self-determination, if the People of Nicaragua can ask

for self-determination, if the People of Ireland can ask for self-determination, if the People of

Poland can ask for self-determination, if Black People in America can stand up and demand

self-determination, then Puerto Ricans demand self-determination."

I will forgo a discussion of the backdrop to the Mexican-American movement here because, after all, you’ve read four chapters in the textbook on that.

Jose “Cha Cha” Jimenez

Young Lords March

Issues of the YLP’s official newspaper, Palante

Heading Towards the Movement

Asa Philip Randolph was the architect of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, an all-black union and one of the most powerful in the United States (and as a quick aside, a sleeping car porter was basically like a steward or a on an airplane –they took care of all of your needs if you were traveling in a sleeping car on a train, a sleeping car meaning a railway car that had rooms with beds). He was also largely responsible for forcing the hand of President Roosevelt in issuing Executive Order 8802 in June of 1941, which established the Fair Employment Practices Commission, aimed at eliminating racial discrimination in hiring in the national defense industry, and also desegregated the defense industry. Randolph‘s threat to have 100,000 black men march on Washington was, to quote FDR, “like a gun pointed at my head.” Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., would count Randolph as one of his most important sources of inspiration, which is why he was given a place of honor near King when he gave his “I have a dream” speech in Washington, D.C. in 1963. The following political cartoons on this topic are courtesy of the inimitable Theodore Geisel, otherwise known as Dr. Seuss.

The “Double ‘V’ for Victory” Campaign was established by the NAACP in early 1942 after the U.S. entered World War II. The purpose of the campaign was to challenge racism by using the patriotic spirit of the war effort to force Americans to see things from a different perspective. The most successful part of the campaign was that which ultimately desegregated restaurants in two states that had formerly been slave states –Maryland and Delaware. It may seem odd, looking at a map of the U.S. today, to think that these two states, so far north, were considered part of the South prior to the Civil War, but indeed they were –

any state that allowed slavery prior to the War was a “southern” state, and so – Maryland and Delaware. Racism was still strong in these states, stronger than in neighboring states like New Jersey, but far less intense than in Mississippi and Alabama, and other states of the Deep South. The NAACP knew that to challenge racism in the way they intended was sure to invite not just criticism, but anger and perhaps even violence, but they also knew that any sort of resistance to be faced would be much easier to weather in the Upper South, as opposed to the Deep South, where lynchings were still commonplace.

In the Maryland and Delaware, white restaurants served African Americans, but only on to-go orders, and after ordering, blacks had to wait outside while their food was prepared.

was gambling on the assumption that the majority of whites in these states would reject discrimination in restaurant service if only their better nature could be appealed to in the right way. So they began to picket lunch counters, small restaurants, generally without tables, seating as few as 15-20 people, or as many as 50-60, generally speaking, that did almost of their business between the hours of 11 AM and 2 PM. Some were open for breakfast, but almost all closed by 2-3 in the afternoon. To have their lunch business disrupted was a ruinous prospect that no business could tolerate for long if it hoped to STAY in business. So the NAACP picketers arrived (and I apologize for not having any

pictures of them specifically, but as of yet I have not been able to locate any) a little before 11 in the morning, armed with signs that said WOULD YOU BUY A HAMBURGER FROM HITLER? or MUSSOLINI MAKES BETTER MALTS THAN MEL (Mel’s Diner?) or how ‘bout

TAKE YOUR BREAK AT TOJO’S LUNCH COUNTER! The idea of a “Double ‘V’ for Victory” was this – World War II was a war against, among other things, racism – it may not have been stated as such by the government, but all of the fascist powers had a racist ideology that helped to support it, and if the United States and her allies were fighting to defeat fascism, then they were also fighting to defeat racism. So one ‘V’

was for victory abroad against the foreign enemies, and the other ‘V’ was for victory at home against the enemy within – the racist attitudes, institutions, and ideology. The picketers were saying to everyone that arrived for lunch at these restaurants: Hey, if you eat here, if you give this man your business, if you support this restaurant and its policies – why then, you might as well be supporting the bad guys that our boys are fighting overseas right this very minute. And if so, then does that say about YOU? They forced the patrons of these

eating establishments to look within themselves, and to determine if they liked what they found there. And because it had been nearly one hundred years since the Civil War, and because over that time period and in spite of the survival of many racist and prejudicial attitudes, the people of the states of the Upper South had become more like their northern neighbors and less like the states of the Deep South…the campaign succeeded. The restaurants of Maryland and Delaware, slowly but surely, faster in the cities, more slowly in the towns and rural areas, desgregated. It was bad for business when blacks stopped buying your take-out food, but it was disastrous when an awful lot of your white clientele started eating elsewhere. It also helped that the NAACP picketers were well-dressed and polite, rather than demonstrably angry and confrontational –as Cesar Chavez so correctly observed twenty years later, the easiest way to convince people to see things your way is to do so with friendliness and peace ful intentions, not hostility. And the most valuable lesson to come out of this for the NAACP was that if they worked together in large numbers to challenge the legitimacy of some aspect of the system – they could force the system to change. This insight would be of enormous importance in the years to come.

African Americans and World War IIAll American soldiers served together, ate together, showered together, fought together, sweated, bled and died together – except for African Americans, who served in their own segregated units. It might seem strange that they were the only segregated soldiers, when Native/Asian/Latino Americans, who suffered from discrimination in the United States as did blacks, were not. The reason for

this has to do with the fact that the majority of soldiers in the U.S. Army were from the South, and as a group, harbored particularlyhostile feelings regarding associating too closely with blacks – to be sure, not all Southerners felt this way, but many did, even demanding, when injured, to be reassured as to the fact that any blood given to them by transfusion would come from white men, such was their horror over the prospect of becoming “____ % BLACK.” When World War I began for the United States, it became clear quickly that there would not be enough men volunteering to fill the ranks, so the government decided that all men between the ages of 21-31 would be required by law to sign up for conscription; it was also

decided at this time to allow blacks to enlist. This resulted in the creation of the 369th

Infantry Regiment, which came to be known as the “Harlem Hellfighters,” a name that derived from their terrific record of success on the battlefield (the unit was never forced to retreat, nor were any of their number ever captured by the enemy – or to be more

accurate, two of their number were captured, but were soon liberated by their fellow soldiers). They were also known as the “Black Rattlers” and the hommesde bronze, or “men of bronze” by the French.

The reason behind blacks’ enlisting in large numbers in both World Wars was the hope that

their show of bravery and patriotism would help, by example, to combat racism in the U.S.This gamble did not pay off after World War I, when returning servicemen were faced with race riots and the re-

emergence of the Ku Klux Klan, but within a very few years of World War II, they would begin to see the reward for their show of patriotism.

One of the essential tasks performed by black soldiers (75% of the drivers were black) was to drive supply trucks from established positions to the front lines of the fighting – fuel, weapons, parts, ammunition, food, medical supplies – all of it was transported on the Red Ball Express. Between August and November of 1944 alone, during the push to drive the German forces back into Germany, a fleet of 5,958 trucks transported 412,000 tons of supplies, which included 10 million gallons of gasoline. This was an incredibly high-risk

assignment, as the enemy made a special point of targeting supply lines when possible, and the private logic of the U.S. military command was even if only 10% of the drivers made it through on any given run, it would still be worth the sacrifice. These drivers, and black soldiers serving in other areas of the war effort, including the worst of the fighting, may not have received a hero’s welcome from the general public once the war was over, but their efforts did not escape the notice of the president of the United States, Harry

Truman who, in late 1946, created The President’s Committee on Civil Rights, whose task was to investigate the abuse of the civil rights of non-Whites nation-wide, and then make recommendat-ations as to how things might be improved.(To the left, a Red Ball Express truck in a German military museum! On the side you can see the names and unit IDs of soldiers who drove, repaired, or loaded the truck.)

A brief time-out: This picture is too wonderful NOT to share, right?

Desegregating the Armed Forces

About six months later, the committee issued their report, entitled “To Secure These Rights.” In it, they suggested that the government should set up a standing Civil Rights Commission, a Congressional Committee on Civil Rights, as well as a permanent fair employment practices commission, and that the Justice Dept should create within it a civil rights division. They also recommended that the federal government enact anti-lynching legislation and bring an end to the poll tax. All of this would obviously take some time. But Truman wanted to take some action immediately to show his commitment to the report. Asa Philip Randolph and other black activists had been talking to the President about desegregating the military, and Truman, who had been mulling this over himself (he had served in World War I) saw the strength in the timing aware, as he was, that black servicemen had been a great source of strength for the United States in World War II. He also knew that such a decision was something that should rightly pass through Congress, but he also saw quite rightly that that would not come to pass anytime soon. For Congress to desegregate the armed forces first the House, then the Senate, would have to pass the measure. Truman knew that every Southern vote, and enough from other conservative states, would be cast against it – and it would go nowhere.

And because of this, he decided to take matters into his own hands, and issued Executive Order 9981, which abolished racial discrimination in the United States military. In signing it (below) Truman quoted Victor Hugo: “There is nothing so powerful as an idea whose time has come.”

Many Southern Democrats agreed wholeheartedly, except that they had a different idea, which was to leave the Democrats behind and form their own party, the State’s Rights Democratic Party, or as they were more commonly known, the DixiecratsTheir platform, in part, is spelled out on the following page:

“We stand for the segregation of the races and the racial integrity of each race; the constitutional right to choose one's associates; to accept private employment without governmental interference, and to earn one's living in any lawful way. We oppose the elimination of segregation, the repeal of miscegenation statutes, the control of private employment by Federal bureaucrats called for by the misnamed civil rights program. We favor home-rule, local self-government and a minimum interference with individual rights.”

So maybe just call them the ‘hillbilly party’ and leave it at that, right?

Two last, interesting items: the Secretary of the Army held a press conference not long after Truman’s action, and announced that the President was mistaken in his decision, and that his mistake would surely be rectified soon, and etc. Not a well-advised move – Truman fired him. Also, many people wondered if it could work – would white soldiers, especially Southerners, eat, shower, bunk, with black soldiers? Quite often, when this topic would come up in conversation, the answer would come back: “Look at Jackie Robinson and the Brooklyn Dodgers!” The implication being, baseball is a GAME, and the military is about WAR, about life and death, serious stuff – they’re going to figure it out. And that’s what they did – the integration of the military moved forward with almost no trouble whatsoever.

Desegregating the National Pasttime: Baseball, Brooklyn, Branch Rickey, and Jackie Robinson

In the modern world of many, many (too many!) cable channels, one can always find sports to watch, nearly any sport you want at any time of the day or night, or if nothing else, news and talk about sports. But get into Sherman and Mr. Peabody’s Wayback Machine with me – SWOOSH! – and let’s travel back to a time when there were only about 45,000 television sets nationwide, to a time when the country and the spread of information was defined by the radio, the movies with their pre-show newsreels, and print media, primarily the newspapers – that time was the 1940s. At that time there were only three sports of truly national scope and fascination – the sports fan reading this has immediately come up with the answer in his or her mind. The freebie is easy, as it’s in the title above – duh, baseball, sure. Now, the other two…commit yourself to two guesses, and then continue on to the next slide.

NO, not football. Football never became a truly national phenomenon until they put it on TV in the early 1960s. NO, not basketball – only founded in

1946, the NBA would not become a thing of national interest until the mid-1960s. Now you’re scratching your head – NO, not soccer! SOCCER?! Really? That’s barely a national sport now, and it

ain’t hockey -- that’s for Canadians. This is the US of A, friends.

Now you’re thinking harder. Some of you could care less, but the sports geeks are THINKING. And look, don’t waste my time with golf, bowling, track and

field…skiing, skateboarding, surfing…NO! These are not sports.

You heard me.

Not. Sports.

Now you just think I’m a jerk, but ask yourself this:

what IS a sport? DEFINE “sport.” Tricky, huh? Think like Socrates, boil it down to its essentials, and here

is what you should get: a sport is an athletic competition wherein one must play both offense and defense in order to win. Golf, bowling, etc –

they ARE athletic competitions, sure thing, and I’m not putting down anyone who engages in those

activities, but they are NOT sports –

they are games and competitive activities that require strength, hand-eye coordination, athletic ability…but they are NOT sports. I don’t care if Sports Center covers them, or Sports Illustrated – it’s not my fault if they don’t define their terms.

Volleyball’s a sport – offense AND defense. So is wrestling. And tennis. And a lot of other things.

So, back to the main point – what are the other two sports that Americans, north, south, east, and west followed, cared about, in the late 1940s?

Are you ready? Is the suspense killing you?

DON’T TOUCH THAT MOUSE YET!

(OK, go ahead)

Horse racing and heavyweight boxing. Yup, true story. Those are the other two. Some of you guessed boxing, I betcha, but few if any of you got horse racing.

And I know good and well some of you are disagreeing with my “sports/not sports” argument, right? But boxing? The essence of boxing is offense and defense, that’s ALL it is.

But, I hear you: Come on Dave, HORSE RACING?! Yes, horse racing. Offense? Sure, you’re trying to get around that track faster than the other guy. Defense? Sure, if you have ever seen the ponies run, you know that part of the strategy of a good rider is to try and edge the other jockeys out of position in the turns (more offense!),

and when that is employed against you, then you have to ride defensively to prevent being pushed out of position. So, yeah – SPORT. In fact, it’s historically referred to as “the sport of kings.”

And if you still don’t believe me, read the book or watch the movie Seabiscuit – you’ll be convinced.

But while boxing was big, and so was horse racing, the most popular sport by far, by a country mile, was baseball, so let’s turn to that now…

A few years ago the movie 42 did a very good job of showing most of the ‘how’ and some of the ‘why’ behind Jackie Robinson’s joining the Brooklyn Dodgers. But the filmmakers were at the mercy of the 2-hour feature film format, and they could only show/tell so much. Happily, you have me to give you just a little bit more pertinent information regarding this topic. And how it fits into the overall history of the civil rights movement.

Branch Rickey had been the general manager of the St. Louis Cardinals from 1919 through 1942, and in the late 1930s he gave a lot of thought to integrating his team. But Missouri had been a slave state, and while it may not have been as racist as Mississippi or South Carolina, it was also not quite

so progressive as Maryland and Delaware -- it carried the old smell of slavery in many ways, and Jim Crow was strong there. So Rickey set aside his notions of how to improve the game he loved so much, and bided his time. Rickey was hired away from the Cardinals by the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1942, and it was here that he realized his chance had come. New York City was a far more cosmopolitan and tolerant place than St. Louis, and Rickey believed that his ideas could take wing there. It’s important to note that Rickey’s desire to bring black ballplayers into the big leagues was not because he was a “civil rights activist,” but because he had been angered over the treatment of black players when he was a manager of college baseball, because he was a Christian, because he knew the game would be improved by the introduction of some of the many excellent ballplayers in the Negro

Leagues, and because he knew that the latter improvement would result in a great deal of profit for baseball. Make no mistake about it, Branch Rickey was in this to make money for his club.

In 1944 Rickey sent his scouts out to look for the right kind of black ball-player. He had a very specific sort of man in mind, and gave the scouts a list of criteria from which to assess the measure of each player they thought might fit the bill.

Rickey wanted this ballplayer to be a five tool player (non-baseball geeks, look that up if you like); to excel at the mental aspects of the game; to be a great athlete; to be a college man and a veteran. He was also looking for a player who had grown up with and played against whites, and was handsome, in addition to being a “fine gentleman” – luckily for him, Jackie Robinson had it all.

Rickey signed Robinson to a contract in 1945, and after some time in the minor leagues, the color barrier was broken in 1947 when Robinson started the season with the National League’s Brooklyn Dodgers.

Larry Doby was signed to the Cleveland Indians, thus being the first Black player in the American

League. But Cleveland was not New York City, and Robinson was first, so Doby’s arrival around the

same time is often forgotten. To say that Jackie Robinson’s first season was a trial by fire is to say too

little. The film 42, again, does a terrific job of showing the racist vitriol that was spewed at him during

every game, and the death threats that were received by Robinson at home and by the Dodgers

management. But it does not mention the threat to kidnap his infant son, nor the fact that there were

men prevented from bringing concealed

firearms into nearly every game – so

would they have taken a shot at him?

It seems unlikely, but who knows?

That he played as well as he did that first season (winning Rookie of the Year), under such excruciating pressure, going up to bat, never knowing if he might have a rock or a brick thrown at him, or worse, if he might be shot…that he was one of the best players in the league, in spite of all that pressure…how many could manage such a feat?

Well, let me just say this: in the year 2000, in its last issue of the 20th century, Sports Illustrated ran a story on the greatest athlete of the last 100 years. There were many worthy candidates, and finishing near the top of the list were Bill Russell, Jim Thorpe, Michael Jordan, and Jackie Robinson. Muhammad Ali was chosen as #1, but in my opinion, they got it wrong. Not to slight The Greatest, but he did not have to do what he did under the sort of conditions that Jackie Robinson did – and for my money, performance, or (as the cartoon says, by way of a line from Ernest Hemingway) grace, under pressure? That’s when greatness is truly measured.

BROWN vs BOARD of EDUCATION, TOPEKA, KANSAS

First, some background: Oliver Brown was a working man, a welder (and an assistant pastor at his church), no political activist, certainly not a radical, but he resented the fact that he and his family lived seven blocks from a new white school, and his daughter had to take the bus twenty-one blocks to a black school. It’s also worth noting that Brown, and the thirteen other parents named as plaintiffs in the suit on behalf of their twenty children were all recruited by the NAACP (who engaged their legal counsel), to stand up to the segregation law. Brown was named as the lead plaintiff because it was deemed best as a legal strategy to have a man at the head of the roster in order to make a favorable impression with the justices of the Supreme Court because, as the NAACP anticipated defeat in the courts of Kansas, they were thinking about their long distance prospects in Washington from the start.

True to prediction, the case was lost in Kansas on the grounds of “separate but equal,” as enshrined in the 1896 Supreme Court decision Plessy v. Ferguson. The case was brought before the Supreme Court in combination with four other cases originating in Delaware, South Carolina, Virginia, and Washington, D.C., and argued by the chief counsel for the NAACP, Thurgood Marshall. Interestingly, and something not often discussed, President Truman’s Justice Department filed a ‘friend of the court’ brief in the case which focused almost exclusively upon the foreign policy aspects of the civil rights struggles of blacks in the United States. This bears some discussion.

In 1950 UNESCO (The United Nation’s Educational, Scientific, Cultural Organization) had published a paper signed by an array of scholars from around the globe that a) morally condemned racism, and b) dismissed any scientific attempts to justify racism. The United States at this time was locked in a struggle for influence and power with the Soviet Union –some of the most important proving grounds in this struggle were the recently- and soon-to-be-liberated colonies of the European powers, most of which were in Africa, and all of which were in parts of the world populated by people with dark skin. American diplomats and goodwill ambassadors were finding it difficult to argue for the superiority of the “American Way” when photographs, newsreels, and reports of the abuse and lynchings of blacks and their civil rights struggles were being gleefully held up for mockery by Russian leaders and spread worldwide through the means of modern mass communication. As Justice Earl Warren said in a 1954 speech to the American Bar Association, "Our American system like all others is on trial both at home and abroad, ... the extent to which we maintain the spirit of our constitution with its Billof Rights, will in the long run do more to make it both secure and the object of adulation than the number of hydrogen bombs we stockpile."

Justice Felix Frankfurter

The case was heard by the Court in the spring, and again in the winter of 1953 – it was difficult to reach a consensus. The various justices had many concerns, among them: was it the Court’s place to do what Congress had NOT done, namely, overturn segregation? Should this not be left to the individual states? Some felt cultural assimilation was incomplete on the part of blacks. One argued that for more than half a century the states had been led to believe that segregation was OK, and that it was unfair to now reverse policy on them. There was concern over how to enforce it, and

whether such a decision might not lead to widespread armed conflict. But there was also concern over recent scientific studies, such as that undertaken by the educational psychologists Kenneth and Mamie Clark. Their doll-test studies had made it very clear to most of the justices that segregation had a deleterious effect on the mental abilities of black schoolchildren.

Ultimately, the justice’s discussions made it clear that the Court was going to come down 5-4 in favor of Brown, but the feeling of Felix Frankfurter was that a unanimous decision had to be made, because anything less would allow segregationists to forever seize on the fact that SOME justices had voted AGAINST desegregation and use that as a rallying point for racist agitprop. From Frankfurter’s point of view, of the four justices voting against Brown, two seemed easily swayed, but of the other two, one was the Chief Justice, Fred Vinson, who was no racist but was deeply conflicted over judicial activism and so committed to a ‘no’ vote, and Justice Stanley Reed was going to go along with Vinson as a Southerner and a segregationist; Vinson’s mind could not be changed, and neither could his. It appeared that a unanimous decision was an impossibility. And then, the impossible happened: Fred Vinson dropped dead of a heart attack in September, and Felix Frankfurter was quoted as saying: “This is the first indication I have ever had that there is a God.”

Now it was up to President Eisenhower to determine who the next Chief Justice would be, and his choice was Earl Warren, who was nearly done with his term as governor of California. Warren had served in World War I, been an attorney, state attorney, and then governor, and was known to be honest and incorruptible. The only thing that could be said against him was that he had been exceedingly supportive of the federal government’s policy of interning the Japanese-American population of California during World War II, although, one could say in his defense that he lived to see the error in this policy, as he spoke out in regret of it later in life. Eisenhower believed that Warren, like himself, was an essentially conservative moderate, but he was destined to be proven wrong. Dead wrong.

Warren knew that the only way to address Brown v. Board was to confront Plessy v. Ferguson directly. That decision, and it’s enshrinement of ”separate but equal” as the foundation of segregationist policies in the United States, could only make sense if the Court accepted black inferiority. While he agreed that the Court had to be wary of “legislating from the bench,” he did not want to allow the continuing punishment of black children by having them attend inferior schools. As he said to Frankfurter one day in words that the justice wrote down later, “The law cannot in this day and age set them apart.” But how to do what needed to be done with as little turmoil as possible? As Justice Tom Clark put it: “We don’t have money at the Court for an army, we can’t take ads in the newspapers, and we don’t want to go

out on a picket line in our robes. We have to convince the nation by force of our opinions.” Warren, like Frankfurter, knew they had to have a unanimous decision, and sharply framed their discussion in language that made anyone in opposition appear to be a racist. Stanley Reed held out as the lone dissenter, the straw vote going 8-1, for four months, before finally giving in to Warren’s ceaseless persuasion through endless lunchtime conversations whose themes recurrently ran along the lines of, “”Stan, you’re all by yourself in this now, and you’ve got to decide the best thing for the country.” Reed’s only condition was that the process of desegregation be gradual, not swift, so that the White Southerners feel less “punished” by the decision.

The Brown decision was perhaps the single most important occurrence of the decade in America, because it not only legally ended segregation but made it clear that segregationist actions had no moral legitimacy. It enlarged the concept of freedom and shifted the Court in the direction of being more favorable towards the granting of rights to minority groups who had previously been discriminated against. And because of Brown, local, state, and national newsmen felt entitled to actively pursue stories of racism and discrimination – this was also something new under the sun. It’s worth noting that not every-

One agreed with the Court’s decision – surprised? Just to give one example, in Virginia, Harry Byrd organized the “Massive Resistance” movement, which shut down public schools in 1958 and 1959 (!!!) but state and federal courts declared all of this nonsense unconstitutional, as indeed it was, and the schools were re-opened. Other Southern states carried out similarly lame-brained responses. In 1963, a full decade later, civil rights activist Medgar Evers sued to desegregate the schools in Jackson, Mississippi (because enforcement of Brown had proven tricky during that first decade after the Court’s decision) and was shot down for his audacity.

In 1955 the Court heard arguments from schools ordered to desegregate that they needed more time to take care of the situation, and the Court gave the responsibility of overseeing the process to federal district courts, ordering that desegregation be carried out “with all deliberate speed.” Many were dismayed by this move, and felt that it gave segregationists legal justification to resist and delay legitimate desegregation for years utilizing a variety of clever tactics – shutting down school systems, allowing some blacks into white schools, and establishing segregated private schools for privileged white children in advance of full segregation.

And while this is all true, and sometimes the wheels of change and justice do turn slowly –ultimately, Brown did what it was supposed to do, the nation was better for it, and, in the words of Abraham Lincoln in his Second Inaugural Address, “as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said ‘the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether’."

I am deeply indebted to the great David Halberstam for his insights on the Brown case – may he rest in peace.

On an interesting side note – Earl Warren had a driver when he was governor, Edgar “Pat” Patterson, who had been born and raised in segregated Louisiana, around about the same time Warren was being born and raised in sunny California. They had long, interesting chats on their lengthy drives in to work during the decade Warren was governor and Patterson, and others, later made the point that it was their frank discussions on racial issues that helped Warren to see the issue of race, and civil rights, in the way that he did, and that his shift to a more liberal brand of politics as Chief Justice was also largely to do with the time spent with Patterson. True story? We’ll never know, but it’s sort of like the original Driving Miss Daisy!

ONLY A PAWN IN THEIR GAME, Bob Dylan, 1963

A bullet from the back of a bushTook Medgar Evers' bloodA finger fired the trigger to his nameA handle hid out in the darkA hand set the sparkTwo eyes took the aimBehind a man's brainBut he can't be blamedHe's only a pawn in their game

A South politician preaches to the poor white man"You got more than the blacks, don't complainYou're better than them, you been born with white skin, " they explainAnd the Negro's nameIs used, it is plainFor the politician's gainAs he rises to fameAnd the poor white remainsOn the caboose of the trainBut it ain't him to blameHe's only a pawn in their game

The deputy sheriffs, the soldiers, the governors get paidAnd the marshals and cops get the sameBut the poor white man's used in the hands of them all like a toolHe's taught in his schoolFrom the start by the ruleThat the laws are with himTo protect his white skinTo keep up his hateSo he never thinks straight'Bout the shape that he's inBut it ain't him to blameHe's only a pawn in their game

From the poverty shacks, he looks from the cracks to the tracksAnd the hoofbeats pound in his brainAnd he's taught how to walk in a packShoot in the backWith his fist in a clinchTo hang and to lynchTo hide 'neath the hoodTo kill with no painLike a dog on a chainHe ain't got no nameBut it ain't him to blameHe's only a pawn in their game

Today, Medgar Evers was buried from the bullet he caughtThey lowered him down as a kingBut when the shadowy sun sets on the oneThat fired the gunHe'll see by his graveOn the stone that remainsCarved next to his nameHis epitaph plainOnly a pawn in their game

Reading the lyrics is one thing, but to really get the power of the song, go to youtube and dig Dylan singing it, in the year that he wrote and recorded it, not long after Evers was shot – there’s not many songs like it. Just a man, a guitar, and a harmonica. There’s a reason that Bob won the Nobel Prize for Literature.

The Significance of the Black Movement

Now, what I just did was acquaint you folks with some of the things that were happening just PRIOR and up to what we generally think of as the beginning of the traditional starting point of “THE civil rights movement,” and that’s the Brown decision. I like to go into those things in some detail, not just because I think that they are important, but also because I think that discussions of the civil rights movement in classes dealing with U.S. history tend to start too late (in 1954) and end too early (in 1965), as if nothing was done prior to 1965, and nothing happened after 1865 – it’s a nice, tight decade bookended by those two dates, and historians do like to tidy things up when they can. But the reason I call this lecture ‘The Era for the Movements of Civil Rights, 1941-1973…and Beyond?’ is because I want to stress that it was not ONLY African-Americans that had, or were in need of, a civil rights movement. Theirs was first, biggest, and ultimately most successful (to this point), but sometimes our emphasis on THE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT and all of those legendary figures and moments...Dr. King...Rosa Parks...Medgar Evers...Emmet Till...the bus boycott...Brown v. Board...the March on Washington, and on Selma...the Freedom Rides…and etc, tends to obscure the fact that there were those other groups, and other leaders, other civil rights movements, some of them

still going on today, because clearly, we still haven’t got the country straightened out. That’s the other OTHER point of the title of the lecture --that ‘...and Beyond?’ at the end of it leaves it open-ended, because I don’t KNOW when we are going to have our act together, if ever – I like to think we’ll get there, I like to imagine a U.S. History college class of the year...oh, say, 2137, and in their textbook there’s a chapter entitled: Ch. 14 – The Era of the Movements for Civil Rights, 1941-2052. Or 2076, 2091, 2112. SOME year we’re going to have gotten to a place where we can all “just get along” and treat one another with basic human dignity.

But OK – don’t want to start soapboxing here. Let’s consider for a moment what I said in asserting that the black movement was the biggest and most successful of the various civil rights movements. What are the reasons behind this? First, until the late 20th century, blacks were the second largest racio-ethnic group in the country, after Whites, and in the 1950s and 60s the third largest, Latinos, was not even remotely close in size. So when a large percentage of the African-American population finally got rolling behind the various movements within the civil rights movement, you’re talking about a tremendous NUMBER OF PEOPLE, not to mention all of the non-black people that also stood up and got involved, marched, demonstrated, etc, to try and square the record as far as civil rights were

concerned. Along with numbers came MONEY – even if the majority of blacks were lower class – if enough lower class folks are donating small amounts of money when and where they can, when you combine that with the contributions of other people of middle and upper class backgrounds, both black and non-black – it comes out to a lot of money, and the movements needed money – money to rent office space, pay for radio time, newspaper advertising, printing leaflets and fliers, paying travel expenses for representatives to travel to meet with state and federal officials, and on and on and on. As civil rights organizations grew, there were people who worked for them full time – they had to be paid. So a big part of the success of the black movement had to do with numbers, and the money that those numbers generated. Puerto Rican Americans had a civil rights movement that started in 1968, the Young Lords – started up in Chicago by Jose “Cha Cha” Jimenez. But because their numbers were small, they were never able to generate much in

the way of funding, and that really hindered their ability to get much done. The numbers in the African-American movement also equaled VISIBILITY – it takes a lot of people to make things happen (see the next slide) if you intend to adhere to peaceful nonviolence, and you need to make things HAPPEN if you want the news organizations to notice you – and if the news didn’t notice you, you and your civil rights movement weren’t going anywhere – remember guys, this is before cell phones, the internet, and things going viral simply as the result of the actions of interested citizens. When you can summon up several hundred thousand people and march on the nation’s capital? THAT gets you noticed. That’s something that the leaders of the country can’t ignore, and that’s a power that at that time was really only held by blacks, as far as the groups that were organizing to fight for their civil rights.

And there were other strengths that came from being able to draw from a larger population base as well. One of them had to do with LEADERSHIP. What you wanted out of your movement’s leadership was natural intelligence, and hopefully, education. So the kind of people that you, as a black person, might like to see stepping up and lending a hand in, say, Alabama in 1950 would be college-educated professional men – going to be hard enough getting anywhere in the South, best not try and have women running the show – this was still a man’s world, for the most part. In Montgomery, Alabama, in 1950, according to the census, there were appr. 40,000 blacks, and to serve their needs there was one dentist, three doctors, two lawyers, one pharmacist…and ninety-two preachers. NINETY-TWO PREACHERS! Now any of those individuals were probably men who could write, organize a group of people, intelligent,

educated individuals...but there is only one profession there whose job, whose very purpose is to stand up in front of large groups of people and through the power of their rhetoric, rally hearts and minds, and fill their listeners with purpose, lead them in a certain direction, remind them of who they are supposed to be and what they are supposed to stand for – and this is the place where the black movement had it ALL OVER the Puerto Rican, the Native American, the Chicano, the women’s, and the LGBT’s rights movements – because none of those other groups had a built-in cadre of potential charismatic leaders like the African-American community did.

And when you measure success – well look no further than the 24th Amendment to the Constitution...the Civil Rights Act of 1964…the Voting Rights of 1965...and a handful of other civil rights laws passed in the mid-60s that would not have come about, or certainly not so soon, were it not for the black civil rights movement.

But again – this was just the first stage in the “era of the movements for civil rights,” or if you will, the trunk of the civilrights tree. Because out of the black movement branched the Puerto Rican movement, the Young Lords; and A.I.M., the American Indian Movement. The women’s rights movement was given new legs in many ways as a result of the example of the concessions won in the African American civil rights struggles. The gay liberation movement, starting in the late 1960s or early 1970s (depending on which historian you subscribe to), evolved into what is now referred to as the LGBT social movement, and it is clearly the civil rights movement that is most at the forefront of national discourse today. Lastly, the Chicano movement, with its many strains – Jose Angele Gutierrez and La Raza Unida Party in Texas; Reies Lopez Tijerina and the Alianza in New Mexico; Corky Gonzales and La Crusada por la Justicia in Colorado; the

Brown Berets and the high-school “blowouts” in L.A.; and of course, Cesar Chavez, Dolores Huerta, and the United Farmworkers in Delano, California – it’s hardly credible to posit the existence of these movements, let alone any successes they enjoyed, without the example of the black movements that came first. So in the next Video Lecture, the focus will be on the backdrop to, and the circumstances of, some parts of the Chicano Movement, but before we head off that way, there are a few more images and information for you to drink in in the slides that follow.

Rosa Parks being fingerprinted by a police officer, and on the right, African American participants in the Montgomery bus

boycott that resulted from her arrest.

Some of the Freedom Riders and, in the following image, a map of their movements through the South.

Martin Luther King, Jr., Birmingham jail, April 1963. It was during this incarceration that he produced one of the finest pieces of writing in the history of the country, “Letter from a

Birmingham Jail.” (Excerpt following)

We have waited for more than 340 years for our constitutional and God given rights. The nations of Asia and Africa are moving with jetlike speed toward gaining political independence, but we still creep at horse and buggy pace toward gaining a cup of coffee at a lunch counter. Perhaps it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging darts of segregation to say, "Wait." But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim; when you have seen hate filled policemen curse, kick and even kill your black brothers and sisters; when you see the vast majority of your twenty million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society; when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six year old daughter why she can't go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see tears welling up in her eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children, and see ominous clouds of inferiority beginning to form in her little mental sky, and see her beginning to distort her personality by developing an unconscious bitterness toward white people; when you have to concoct an answer for a five year old son who is asking: "Daddy, why do white people treat colored people so mean?"; when you take a cross county drive and find it necessary to sleep night after night in the uncomfortable corners of your automobile because no motel will accept you; when you are humiliated day in & day out by nagging signs reading "white" and "colored"; when when your first name becomes "nigger," your middle name becomes "boy" (however old you are) and your last name becomes "John," and your wife and mother are never given the respected title "Mrs."; when you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro, living constantly at tiptoe stance, never quite knowing what to expect next, and are plagued with inner fears and outer resentments; when you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of "nobodiness"--then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait.

There comes a time when the cup of endurance runs over, and men are no longer willing to be plunged into the abyss of despair. I hope, sirs, you can understand our legitimate and unavoidable impatience. You express a great deal of anxiety over our willingness to break laws. This is certainly a legitimate concern. Since we so diligently urge people to obey the Supreme Court's decision of 1954 outlawing segregation in the public schools, at first glance it may seem rather paradoxical for us consciously to break laws. One may well ask: "How can you advocate breaking some laws and obeying others?" The answer lies in the fact that there are two types of laws: just and unjust. I would be the first to advocate obeying just laws. One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws.

Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws.

I would agree with St. Augustine that "an unjust law is no law at all.

March on Washington, August 28, 1963

Dr. King and other civil rights leaders meet with President Johnson, 1964

Selma to Montgomery March, Alabama, 1965

Black Panther Party March, Oakland, CA 1967

Black Panther propagandaposters, 1967

Members of A.I.M., the American Indian Movement, 1969

Members of Indians of All Tribes (IOAT) in possession of Alcatraz Island, 1969

Marchers for the National Organization for Women (NOW), 1969

Totally scary hillbilly racists…nuff said.

Norman Rockwell and Civil Rights

Rockwell was America’s most beloved artist, having done over 300 covers for the Saturday Evening Post, America’s most beloved magazine, over the course of 47 years. He had first dipped his brush into the well of civil rights by doing the ‘Four Freedoms’ paintings at the request of the federal government during World War II, and not long after that, had been written by Roderick Stevens, the African-American head of the Bronx Interracial Conference. Stevens had made the point to Rockwell that blacks still suffered from ‘Want’ and ‘Fear’ – these were two of the ‘Freedoms’ that were denied to too many of them, and urged Rockwell to do a series on race relations that could be printed as posters, just as the ‘Four Freedoms’ paintings had been, showing black contributions to American success and freedom. Rockwell replied to Stevens, but because of the restrictions placed upon him by the editorial staff of the Post, was unable to engage in this endeavor. Rockwell explained in a 1971 interview: “George Horace Lorimer [the Post’s editor], who was a very liberal man, told me never to show colored people except as servants.” (see next slide)

Here in Boy in Dining Car and The Homecoming the Post’s policy is crystal clear – the porter, smiling benignly down on the small boy reading the morning paper, and the repairman, as happy as all of the family and neighbors to see the young man home from the war. Rockwell would be unable to break these constraints until the civil rights movement was well underway, and then in 1960 he returned to an abandoned project of the late 1940s when, after the founding of the United Nations, he had made preliminary sketches for a painting that would act as a tribute to what he believed the potential of the U.N. to be – an organization that could solve some of the world’s many problems. But various issues conspired to discourage his efforts at the time, including his inability to get the delegates of the U.N. to sit for portrait work for any length of time.

When he brought the project back to life in 1961 he entitled it The Golden Rule and had the maxim emblazoned in gold directly onto the painting. Art historians have commented on the fact that none of Rockwell’s previous servile non-whites are to be seen here and, as Jack Doyle has pointed out, it was as if Rockwell were integrating the Post’s covers on his own.

In 1960, when the court-ordered desegregation of several schools in New Orleans were set to begin, white parents kept their kids out of school. At William Frantz Elementary School two children had been kept in by their parents – these families were harassed by their fellow citizens every bit as hard as Ruby Bridges was, the lone black child to attend that school on day one. When she and her mother arrived, escorted by four federal marshals, they were greeted by signs that read “All I Want For Christmas is a Clean White School” and “Save Segregation, Vote States Rights Pledged Electors,” not to mention chants of “Two, Four, Six, Eight, we don’t want to integrate…”

The Problem We All Live With, 1963

Rockwell’s painting of Ruby Bridges on her way to school.

Above: Ruby Bridges with President Obama at the White House, 2011

The appearance of the painting The Problem We All Live With as a kind of “centerfold” in Look magazine (Rockwell had left the Post behind that same year) took Americans by surprise – many loved it, but many were angered by it –all were shocked, precisely because Rockwell had been so belovedly apolitical for so many decades. But, as he said: “For 47 years, I portrayed the best of all possible worlds –grandfathers, puppy dogs – things like that. That kind of stuff is dead now, and I think it’s about time.”

And Rockwell was not done. His next painting in the same vein was executed in 1964 and focused on the murder of three young civil rights workers who were helping to

register black voters in Mississippi. (The film Mississippi Burning covers this historical event – a deeply flawed film, but worth seeing for a variety of reasons.) The work was entitled Southern Justice (below).

Negro In the Suburbs, 1967

Rockwell did several more paintings for Look on the topic of race relations. Negro In the Suburbs was part of an entire issue devoted to suburban life, its pros and cons, and accompanied an article wherein a black woman, suburban wife and mother, stated that “Being a Negro in the middle of white people is like being alone in the middle of a crowd.” Rockwell makes his point by making his two groups of children the same – boys ready for baseball, pets in tow, girls with hair ribbons, everyone curious – in all regards save for the color of their skin. The last of these paintings, while not strictly on race relations, is entitled The Right To Know, and seemingly concerns the issue of increasing numbers of Americans, from all races and walks of life, looking directly to their government and expecting answers to the difficult questions

confronting the American people. As such, perhaps more than any of these works, it seems to sum up the tenor of the times, as the citizens of the United States increasingly strove to make sense of the ways that the country was changing, and how those changes would affect them, their children, and their children’s children.

The Right To Know, 1968

I am indebted to the work of Jack Doyle in this information on Rockwell and his intersection with the civil rights movement.

This story made a lot of internet noise when it went viral in early March, 2017. This little white squirt, Jax Rosebush, age four, asked if he could shave his head so that the teacher could not tell him and his best pal, Reddy Weddon, apart. According to the Facebook post from Jax’s mother that brought this story to the world’s attention, 'The only difference Jax sees in the two of them is their hair.' It’s also worth noting that Reddy and his older brother were adopted by a local pastor and his wife from the Democratic republic of Congo in 2014. I was reminded of these two when I stumbled across this line of Ruby Bridges: “None of us knows anything about disliking one another when we come into the world. It is something that is passed on to us.” Happily, not here, and it’s stories like this that gives one hope for the future.

BEFORE HAIRCUT AFTER HAIRCUT

You may find this of interest – read on if you like. Totally optional.

On June 29, 1947, President Harry Truman spoke to 10,000 members of the NAACP at their 38th Annual Convention from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, the first president ever to address the NAACP, period, let alone at so symbolically important a location.

He declared in this nationally broadcast radio address that the federal government had to take the lead in guaranteeing the civil rights of all American citizens. Later that year the President’s Committee on Civil Rights released its report, To Secure These Rights. Among their recommendations were an anti-lynching law (effectively making this form of murder a federal crime), the abolition of the poll tax, a permanent Fair Employment Practices Committee (FEPC), the desegregation of the military, and laws to enforce fair housing, education, health care, and employment.

One can only hope for a future president bold enough to make a speech of similar import, because as far as we’ve come, we still have a ways to go.