Change from the Bottom-up

So much of the energy and character of the sixties emerged from the civil rights movement, which won its greatest victories in the early years of the decade. The movement itself changed dramatically during this period. Many of the civil rights activists pushing for school desegregation in the 1950s were middle-class and middle-aged, but by the 1960s, a new student movement arose whose members wanted swifter changes in the segregated South. Confrontational protests, marches, boycotts, and sit-ins became the favored tactics.

The Sit-In Movement

On February 1, 1960, four sophomores at the North Carolina Agricultural & Technical College in Greensboro—Ezell Blair, Jr., Joseph McNeil, David Richmond, and Franklin McCain—entered the local Woolworth’s and sat at the lunch counter. The counter was segregated, and they were refused service as they knew they would be. They specifically chose Woolworth’s because it was a national chain and was thus believed to be especially vulnerable to negative publicity.

Over the next few days, more protesters joined the four sophomores. Hostile White customers responded with threats and taunted the students by pouring sugar and ketchup on their heads. But the defiant sit-in was successful; Woolworth’s department stores were desegregated. The protests also offered evidence that student-led direct action could effect social change, a development that would influence the civil rights movement’s direction in the coming years. Within two months of Greensboro, the sit-in movement spread to fifty-four cities in nine states.

Figure 1. Businesses such as this one were among those that became targets of activists protesting segregation. Segregated businesses could be found throughout the United States; this one was located in Ohio. (credit: Library of Congress)

In the words of grassroots civil rights activist Ella Baker, the students at Woolworth’s wanted more than a hamburger; the movement they helped launch was about empowerment. Baker pushed for a “participatory democracy” that built on the grassroots campaigns of active citizens instead of deferring to the leadership of educated elites and experts.

As a result of her actions, in April 1960, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) formed to carry the movement forward. Within a year, more than one hundred cities had desegregated at least some public accommodations in response to student-led demonstrations. The sit-ins inspired other forms of nonviolent protest intended to desegregate public spaces. “Sleep-ins” occupied motel lobbies, “read-ins” filled public libraries, and churches became the sites of “pray-ins.”

Freedom Rides

Students also took part in the 1961freedom rides sponsored by CORE and SNCC. Activists organized interstate bus rides following a Supreme Court decision outlawing segregation on public buses and trains. The rides intended to test the court’s ruling, which many southern states had ignored, and to protest segregated waiting rooms in southern terminals. Departing Washington, DC, on May 4, the volunteers headed south on buses that challenged the seating order of Jim Crow segregation. White people would ride in the back, Black people would sit in the front; on other occasions, riders of different races would share the same bench seat.

The freedom riders encountered little difficulty until they reached Rock Hill, South Carolina, where a mob severely beat John Lewis, a freedom rider who later became chairman of SNCC. The danger increased as the riders continued through Georgia into Alabama, where one of the two buses was firebombed outside the town of Anniston. The second group continued to Birmingham, where Ku Klux Klan members attacked riders as they attempted to disembark at the city bus station. The remaining volunteers continued to Mississippi, where police arrested them when they attempted to desegregate the waiting rooms in the Jackson bus terminal. Despite the ongoing resistance to their work, the Freedom Riders’ persistence paid off. In November 1961, the Interstate Commerce Commission began enforcing the integration of interstate buses and trains.

Figure 2. Civil rights activists Bayard Rustin, Andrew Young, Rep. William Fitts Ryan, James Farmer, and John Lewis (l to r) in a newspaper photograph from 1965.

Free by ’63 (or ’64 Or ’65)

The grassroots efforts to change discriminatory laws and longstanding racist traditions grew more widely known in the mid-1960s. The approaching centennial of Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation spawned the slogan “Free by ’63” among civil rights activists. As African Americans increased their calls for full rights for all Americans, many civil rights groups changed their tactics to reflect this new urgency.

Perhaps the most famous of the civil rights-era demonstrations was the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, held in August 1963, on the one-hundredth anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation. The date also marked the eighth anniversary of the brutal racist murder of fourteen-year-old Emmett Till in Money, Mississippi. The march called for, among other things, civil rights legislation, school integration, an end to discrimination by public and private employers, job training for the unemployed, and a raise in the minimum wage.

On the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, King delivered his famous “I Have a Dream” speech, an internationally renowned call for civil rights that raised the movement’s profile to new heights and put unprecedented pressure on politicians, including President Kennedy, to pass meaningful civil rights legislation. However, neither the March nor King’s speech deterred White terrorism in the South or permanently sustained the tactics of nonviolent civil disobedience.

Figure 3. During the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom (a), a huge crowd gathered on the National Mall (b) to hear the speakers. Although thousands attended, many of the march’s organizers had hoped that enough people would come to Washington to shut down the city.

Other gatherings of civil rights activists ended tragically. Indeed some demonstrations were intended to provoke a hostile response from White people and thus reveal the inhumanity of Jim Crow laws and their supporters. In 1963, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) led by Martin Luther King, Jr. mounted protests in 186 cities throughout the South. The campaign in Birmingham that began in April and extended into the fall of 1963 attracted the most notice, however. There, police attacked demonstrators staging a peaceful protest, including children, with fire hoses and dogs. The world looked on in horror as police assaulted innocent people and arrested thousands.

King himself was jailed on Easter Sunday, 1963, and, in response to the pleas of White clergymen for peace and patience, he penned one of the most significant documents of the struggle—“Letter from a Birmingham Jail.” In the letter, King argued that Black people had waited patiently for more than three hundred years to be given the rights that all human beings deserved; the time for waiting was over.

Freedom Summer

Some of the greatest violence during this era was aimed at those who attempted to register Black people to vote. In 1964, SNCC and CORE helped initiate the Freedom Summer in Mississippi. The purpose was to register Black voters in a state with an ugly history of discrimination. Volunteers also built “freedom schools” and community centers. SNCC invited hundreds of White middle-class students, mostly from the North, to help in the task. Many volunteers were harassed, beaten, and arrested, and African American homes and churches were burned. The Ku Klux Klan killed three civil rights workers: James Chaney, Michael Schwerner, and Andrew Goodman.

Mississippi’s political parties offered no help to the grassroots initiatives. The Mississippi Democratic Party actively continued to promote the disenfranchisement of Black voters. In response, civil rights activists Fannie Lou Hamer, Ella Baker, and Robert Parris Moses formally organized the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) as an alternative to the all-White Mississippi Democratic Party. In 1964, Hamer and other MFDP delegates traveled to the Democratic National Convention and demanded to be seated in the place of the Mississippi Democratic Party. Ultimately, the convention’s organizers allowed only two MFDP delegates to be seated and confined them to the role of nonvoting observers.