Monmouth Regional High School



UNIT 9READINGS and QUESTIONS- Civil Rights MovementAMSCO- THE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENTWhile Eisenhower was concentrating on Cold War issues, events of potentially revolutionary significance were developing in the relations between African Americans and other Americans.Origins of the Movement:The baseball player Jackie Robinson had broken the color barrier in 1947 by being hired by the Brooklyn Dodgers as the first African American to play on a major league team. President Truman had integrated the armed forces in 1948 and introduced civil rights legislation in Congress. These were the first well-publicized indications that race relations after WWII were changing. AS the 1950s began, however, African Americans in the South were still by law segregated from whites in schools and in most public facilities. They were also kept from voting by poll taxes, literacy tests, grandfather clauses, and intimidation. Social segregation left most of them poorly educated, while economic discrimination kept them in a state of poverty.CHANGING DEMOGRAPHICS- The origins of the modern civil rights movement can be traced back to the movement of millions of African Americans from the rural South to the urban centers of the South and the North. In the North, African Americans could vote and by the 1940s and 1950s had become a factor in the politics of the Democratic Party.CHANGING ATTITUDES IN THE COLD WAR- The Cold War also played an indirect role in changing both government policies and social attitudes. The US reputation for freedom and democracy was competing against Communist ideology for the hearts and minds of the people of Africa and Asia. Against this global background, racial segregation and discrimination stood out as glaring wrongs that needed to be corrected.Desegregating the Schools: The NAACP had been working through the courts for decades trying to overturn the Supreme Court’s 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson, which allowed segregation in “separate but equal” facilities. In the late 1940s the NAACP won a series of cases involving higher education.BROWN DECISION- One of the great landmark cases in Supreme Court history was argued in the early 1950s by a team of NAACP lawyers led by Thurgood Marshall. In the case of Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, they argued that segregation of black children in the public schools was unconstitutional because it violated the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of “equal protection of the laws.” In May 1954, the Supreme Court agreed with Marshall and overturned the Plessy case. Writing for a unanimous Court, Chief Justice Earl Warren ruled that (1) “separate facilities are inherently unequal” and unconstitutional and (2) segregation in the schools should end with “all deliberate speed.” RESISTANCE IN THE SOUTH- States in the Deep South fought the Supreme Court’s decision with a variety of tactics, including the temporary closing of the public schools. In Arkansas in 1956, Governor Orval Faubus used the state’s National Guard to prevent 9 African American students from entering Little Rock Central High School, as ordered by a federal court. President Eisenhower then intervened. While the president did not actively support desegregation and had reservations about the Brown decision, he understood his constitutional responsibility to uphold federal authority. Eisenhower ordered federal troops to stand guard in Little Rock and protect black students as they walked to school. He thus became the first president since Reconstruction to use federal troops to protect the rights of African Americans. Montgomery Bus Boycott:Segregation of public transportation also came under attack as a result of one woman’s refusal to take a back seat. In Montgomery, Alabama, in 1955, Rosa Parks was too tired after a long day at work to move to the back of the bus to the section reserved for African Americans. Her arrest for violating the segregation law sparked a massive African American protest in Montgomery in the form of a boycott against riding the city buses. The Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., minister of the Baptist church where the boycott started, soon emerged as the inspiring leader of a nonviolent movement to achieve integration. The protest touched off by Rosa Parks and the Montgomery boycott eventually triumphed when the Supreme Court in 1956 ruled that segregation laws were unconstitutional.Federal Laws:Signed into law by President Eisenhower, two civil rights laws of 1957 and 1960 were the first such laws to be enacted by the US Congress since Reconstruction. They were modest n scope, provided for a permanent Civil Rights Commission and giving the Justice Department new powers to protect the voting rights of blacks. Despite this legislation, southern officials still used an arsenal of obstructive tactics to discourage African Americans from voting.Nonviolent Protests:What the government would not do, the African American community did for itself. In 1957, MLK formed the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), which organized ministers and churches in the South to get behind the civil rights struggle. In February 1960, college students in Greensboro, NC started the sit-in movement after being refused service at a segregated Woolworth’s lunch counter. To call attention to the injustice of segregated facilities, students would deliberately invite arrest by sitting in restricted areas. The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) was formed a few months later to keep the movement organized. In the 1960s African Americans used the sit-in tactic to integrate restaurants, hotels, buildings, libraries, pools, and transportation throughout the South. The actions of the Supreme Court, Congress, and President Eisenhower marked a turning power in the civil rights movement- as did the Montgomery bus boycott. Progress was slow, however. In the 1960s, a growing impatience among many African Americans would be manifested in violent confrontations in the streets.Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1965Ironically, a southern president succeeded in persuading Congress to enact the most important civil rights laws since Reconstruction. Even before the 1964 election, Johnson managed to persuade both a majority of Democrats and some Republicans in Congress to pass the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which made segregation illegal in all public facilities, including hotels and restaurants, and gave the federal government additional powers to enforce school desegregation. This act also set up the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission to end racial discrimination in employment. Also in 1964, the 24th Amendment was ratified. It abolished the practice of collecting a poll tax, one of the measures that, for decades, had discouraged poor persons from voting.In 1965, the brutality in Selma, Alabama against the voting rights marches led by Martin Luther King moved the Congress to pass the Voting Rights Act of 1965. This act ended literacy tests and provided federal registrars in areas in which African Americans were kept from voting. The impact was more dramatic in the Deep South, where African Americans could vote for the first time since the Reconstruction Era.Civil Rights and ConflictThe Civil Rights movement gained momentum during the Kennedy and Johnson presidencies. A very close election in 1960 influenced President Kennedy not to press the issue of civil rights, lest he alienate white voters. But the defiance of the governors of Alabama and Mississippi to federal court rulings changed his mind. When James Meredith, an African American air force veteran, attempted to enroll in the University of Mississippi, a federal court guaranteed his right to attend. Supporting Marshall and the court order, Kennedy sent in 400 federal marshals and 3,000 troops to control mob violence and protect Meredith’s right to attend class. A similar incident occurred in Alabama in 1963. Governor George Wallace tried to stop an African American student from entering the University of Alabama. Once again, President Kennedy sent troops to the scene, and the student was admitted. The Leadership of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.Throughout the Deep South, civil rights activists and freedom riders who traveled through the South registering African Americans to vote and integrating public places were met with beatings, bombings, and murder by white extremists. Recognized nationally as the leaders of the civil rights movement, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., remained committed to nonviolent protests against segregation. In 1963, he and his followers were jailed in Birmingham, Alabama, for what local authorities judged to be an illegal march. The jailing of King, however, proved to be a milestone in the civil rights movement because most Americans believed King to have been jailed unjustly. From his jail cell, King wrote an essay, “Letter From a Birmingham Jail.” The episode moved President Kennedy to support a tougher civil rights bill. In his letter, he argued:… We need emulate neither the ‘do-nothingism’ of the complacent nor the hatred and despair of the black nationalist. For there is the more excellent way of love and nonviolent protest. I am grateful to God that, through the influence of the Negro church, the way of nonviolence became an integral part of our struggle… One day the South will know that when these disinherited children of God sat down at lunch counters, they were in reality standing up for what is best in the American dream and for the most sacred values in our Judeo-Christian heritage, thereby bring out nation back to those great wells of democracy which were dug deep by the founding fathers in their formulation of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence…MARCH ON WASHINGTON 1963: In August 1963, King led one of the largest and most successful demonstrations in US History. About 200,000 blacks and whites took part in the peaceful March on Washington in support of the civil rights bill. The highlight of the demonstration was Dr. King’s impassioned “I Have a Dream” speech, which appealed for the end of racial prejudice and ended with everyone in the crowd singing “We Shall Overcome.”MARCH TO WASHINGTON 1965: When a voting rights march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, in 1965 was met with police beatings, President Johnson sent in the troops to protect Dr. King and other civil rights demonstrators. Johnson also sponsored a powerful voting rights bill. Nevertheless, young African Americans were losing patience with the slow progress toward equality and the continued violence against their people by white extremists.Black Muslims and Malcolm XSeeking a new cultural identity based on Africa and Islam, the Black Muslim leader Elijah Muhammad preached black nationalism, separatism, and self-improvement. The movement had already attracted thousands of followers by the time a young man serving a prison sentence became a convert and adopted the name Malcolm X. Leaving prison in 1952, Malcolm X acquired a reputation as the movement’s most controversial voice. He criticized King as “an Uncle Tom” (subservient to whites) and advocated self-defense- using black violence to counter white violence. He eventually left the Black Muslims to found a more conciliatory Organization of Afro-American Unity, but before he could pursue his ideas, he was assassinated by black opponents in 1965. The Autobiography of Malcolm X remains an engaging testimony to one man’s development from a petty criminal into a major leader.Black Power and Race RiotsThe radicalism of Malcolm X influenced the thinking of young blacks in civil rights organizations such as the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). Stokely Carmichael, the chairman of SNCC, repudiated nonviolence and advocated “black power” (especially economic power) and racial separatism. In 1966, the Black Panthers were organized by Huey Newton, Bobby Seale, and other militants as a revolutionary socialist movement advocating self-rule for American blacks.RIOTS: The Panthers’ frequently shouted slogans- “Get whitey” and “Burn baby, burn”- made whites suspect that black extremists and revolutionaries were behind the race riots that erupted in African American neighborhoods of major cities from 1964 through 1968. In the summer of 1965, for example, riots in the Watts section of Los Angeles resulted in the deaths of 34 people and the destruction of over 700 buildings. There is little evidence, however, that the Black Power movement was responsible for the violence. A federal investigation of the many riots, the Kerner Commission, concluded in late 1968 that racism and segregation were chiefly responsible and that the United States was becoming “two societies, one black, one white- separate and unequal.” By the mid-sixties, the issues of civil rights had spread far beyond de jure segregation practiced under the law in the South and now included the de facto segregation and discrimination caused by racist attitudes in the North and West.MURDER IN MEMPHIS: Martin Luther King Jr. received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964, but his nonviolent approach was under increasing pressure from all sides. His effort to use peaceful marches in urban centers of the North, such as Chicago, met with little success. King also broke with President Johnson over the Vietnam War because that war was beginning to drain money from social programs. In April 1968, the nation again went into shock over the news that King, while standing on a motel balcony in Memphis, Tennessee, had been shot and killed by a white man. Massive riots erupted in 168 cities across the country, leaving at least 46 people dead. The violence did not reflect the ideals of the murdered leader, but it did reveal the anger and frustrations among African Americans in both the North and the South.CONTROVERSY OVER THE AIMS/METHODS OF THE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENTThe decade of the 1960s is destined to be remembered. It was the decade when mankind took one “giant leap” and bridged the gap between earth and moon, but on earth, the gap between men seemed to widen. It was the decade of the “credibility gap” and the “generation gap.” It was a decade of silent majorities and vocal minorities, a decade of protest in the streets, characterized sometimes by peaceful and sometimes by tragically violent methods on both sides. Without doubt the two most crisis-ridden issues of the decade, in the areas of domestic and of foreign policy, were the civil rights movement and the war in Vietnam.During the early and mid-1950s, the civil rights movement had concentrated on legal and legislative action toward the goal of desegregation of public schools, particularly in the South, which was theoretically achieved by the 1954 Supreme Court decision. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, the civil rights movement focused on the goals of voting rights and desegregation of public accommodations, again largely in the South. The method used in this period was primarily nonviolent direct action, which was initiated in the Montgomery, Alabama bus boycott of 1956 and was continued during the student “sit-ins” of 1960 to desegregate lunch counters and during the “freedom rides” of 1961 to desegregate public transportation and its facilities. These goals, plus voting rights, were theoretically won by the passage of the Civil Rights Act in June 1964. After the 1964 the trust of the civil rights movement was directed at eliminating discrimination in education, housing, and job opportunities; and with this shift in goals, came a shift in focus, too. Now the attack included the North as well as the South. Now the movement involved larger masses of African-Americans. Now came the emergence of the black nationalist and black power movements. And now, too, came a shift in methods, as increasing frustrating resulting from comparatively slow progress was channeled into violent direct action and militancy. Martin Luther King Jr., in Support of Nonviolent Direct Action:The Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., head of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), founded in 1957, was the leader and the spokesman for the Negro nonviolent protest movement of the 1950s and 1960s. King was arrested and jailed in the spring of 1963 during a civil rights demonstration and boycott in Birmingham, Alabama, and while in prison wrote the now famous “Letter from Birmingham Jail” in reply to criticism he had received from 8 Birmingham clergymen. In this letter, excerpted below, which was published in the June 12, 1963 issue of Christian Century, Rev. King explained the aims and methods of his movement and philosophy. King’s like was ended violently by an assassin’s bullet on April 4, 1968, in Memphis, Tennessee.You may well ask, “Why direct action? Why sit-ins, marches, etc.? Isn’t negotiation a better path?” You are quite right in calling for negotiation. Indeed, this is the very purpose of direct action. Nonviolent direct action seeks to foster such a tension that a community which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue. It seeks so to dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored. My citing the creation of tension as part of the world of the nonviolent resister may sound rather shocking. But I readily acknowledge that I am not afraid of the word “tension.” I have earnestly opposed violent tension, but there is a type of constructive, nonviolent tension which is necessary for growth… The purpose of our direct action program is to create a situation so crisis-packed that it will inevitably open the door to negotiation. I therefore concur with you in your call for negotiation. Too long has our beloved southland been bogged down in a tragic effort to live in monologue rather than dialogue…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… Now what is the difference between the two? How does one determine whether a law is just or unjust? A just law is a man-made code that squares with the moral law… Any law that uplifts human personality is just. Any law that degrades human personality is unjust. All segregation statutes are unjust because segregation distorts the soul and damages the personality… Thus it is that I can urge men to disobey segregation ordinances, for such ordinances are morally wrong…I hope that you are able to see the distinction I am trying to point out. In no sense do I advocate evading the law, as would the rabid segregationist. That would lead to anarchy. One who breaks an unjust law must do so openly, lovingly, and with a willingness to accept the penalty. I submit that an individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust and who willing accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the communist over its injustice is in reality expressing the highest respect for law…You speak of our activity in Birmingham as extreme. At first I was rather disappointed that fellow clergymen would see my nonviolent efforts as those of an extremist. I began thinking about the fact that I stand in the middle of two opposing forces in the Negro community. One is a force of complacency made up of Negroes who, as a result of long years of oppression, are so completely drained of self-respect and a sense of “somebodiness” that they have adjusted to segregation, and of a few middle class Negroes who, because of a degree of academic and economic security and because in some ways they profit by segregation, have unconsciously become insensitive to the problems of the masses. The other force is one of bitterness and hatred, and it comes perilously close to advocating violence. It is expressed in the various black nationalist groups that are springing up across the nation, the largest and best-known being Elijah Muhammad’s Muslim movement. Nourished by the Negro’s frustration over the continued existence of racial discrimination, this movement is made up of people who have lost faith in America, who have absolutely repudiated Christianity, and who have concluded that the white man is an incorrigible “devil.”I have tried to stand between these two forces, saying that we need emulate neither the “do-nothingism” of the complacent nor the hatred of the black nationalist. For there is the more excellent way of love and nonviolent protest. I am grateful to God that, through the influence of the Negro church, the way of nonviolence became an integral part of our struggle. Editorials in Support of the NAACP:The excerpts below from 3 editorials in the June-July, 1966, and the November 1967 issues of The Crisis explain the aims and methods of the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored Persons) in the civil rights struggle. The Crisis is the official organ of the NAACP.SEMANTICS OF THE CIVIL RIGHTS STRUGGLE:Ten years ago the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People was being branded as “extremist” by the news media because of its insistence upon prompt and full compliance with the constitutional requirement for desegregation of public schools and other public facilities.Now after ten years of slow, often painful but steady progress in desegregation, the same news media insist on labeling the same NAACP as “moderate” or “conservative.” The NAACP, now as then, holds steadfast to its basic commitment to attainment of its goals through constitutional means- legal, legislative, political, educational, and the exercise of First Amendment rights, including peaceable picketing and demonstrations. This has been a program of responsible militancy. It has been productive of the most significant and enduring gains made in the Fight for Freedom… AND NOW, “BLACK POWER”Words, which standing alone are harmless, may in combination with another word or words become baneful. Thus the word “white” is, in and of itself, as innocuous as is the word “supremacy.” But put them together in the phrase, “white supremacy,” and you have something quite different. You have a hateful phrase connotating not only racial snobbery and exclusion but also the rejection and subjugation of all nonwhites. Such a concept has no place in a democratic pluralistic society.So it is with “black” and “power,” perfectly good words alone or in certain combinations, but loaded with racial dynamite when joined together in the phrase “black power.” Like “white supremacy,” it is a polarizing concept not only setting black against white and vice versa, but also black against all nonblacks. This is a late day for the Negro to start emulating the most despicable characteristic of certain white people. In a pluralistic society, the slogan “black power” is as unacceptable as “white supremacy.”Aside from its semantic implications, the concept is mathematically doomed to extinction. Negroes constitute less than 11% of the nation’s total population. But what is vastly more important is our much lower percentage of economic power and firepower. It is fantastic to believe that so disadvantaged a minority can surmount the polarized opposition of an entrenched… majority. The exponents of this slogan have lately been explaining that they don’t really mean “black power.” What they seek, they now say, is political power, development of economic power, and stimulation of racial pride among black people- all worthy goals which have been encompassed within the NAACP program for 57 years without once rising the self-defeating cry of “black power.” The Association has expended huge sums of money, immeasurable energy and brain power in pursuit of these goals, but it has fully recognized the need for cooperation with the nonblack majority. The present burgeoning southern Negro vote is largely the result of NAACP activity not only in the courts and in the legislative halls, but also in the precincts were NAACP volunteers have carried out the hard, tedious, unglamorous task of getting Negroes to register and to vote. Likewise the Association has worked steadily to enlarge the Negro’s opportunities for good jobs and for the development of Negro-owned businesses. Over the years the Association, in the columns of The Crisis and through other publications and means, has sought to enlighten Negroes on their history and to instill a sense of racial pride. If this is what the advocates of this concept mean, why label it with an explosive phrase?The news media did not create this pernicious phrase; they snatched it from the lips of an impassioned “militant” young Negro civil rights leader [Stokely Carmichael], broadcast it across the nation and made it an issue which black people in all ranks have been called upon to evaluate. What the vast majority of black Americans want is freedom, justice, and equality. What they are entitled to, constitutionally and morally, is the enjoyment of their human and civil rights on the same basis as other Americans. To demand these rights is neither militant, moderate, conservative or a fruitless quest of nebulous “black power”.. THE BLACK NEO-SEGREGATIONISTSThe strident cry for racial separation emanating from the extremist black camp is, in essence, a wail of defeat… Traditionally the vast majority of Negro Americans have rejected segregation, which they early recognized as a repressive instrument for maintaining the racial inequalities of American life. Even before the Civil War the majority of free Negroes steadfastly resisted efforts of the white-sponsored American Colonization Society to ship them off to Africa. They asserted their right to remain in the land of their nativity which they helped to explore, build and defend with their sweat, blood and tears…We in the NAACP, as well as others, fought segregation because we had faith in our ability, given equal opportunity and fair ground rules, to compete with and achieve, on a man-to-man basis, with any other Americans of whatever origin. We have demonstrated this capacity in education, in the arts and sciences, in public service and, most notably, in sports and entertainment.And now come the black neo-segregationists who, in their despair and weakness, confess to their inability to compete and call upon their fellow blacks to join them in retreat; to ignore opportunities never before available to them; and to abandon the fight to share equally in the nation’s power and affluence- all of this in futile pursuit of the fantasy of isolated racial self-sufficiency in a period of increasing interdependency of all the peoples of the world. Stokely Carmichael and Charles V. Hamilton in Support of the “Black Power” Movement:Stokely Carmichael, a leader of the black power movement, is representative of the younger and more militant civil rights leaders of the middle and late 1960s. Carmichael was national chairman of SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee which changed its name to the Student National Coordinating Committee) when he originated the term “black power” during a march in Meridian, Mississippi, in June 1966. In the following excerpt from the book Black Power, which he published with Charles V. Hamilton in 1967, Stokely Carmichael explains the meaning, goals, and methods of the black power movement. The adoption of the concept of Black Power is one of the most legitimate and healthy developments in American politics and race relations in our time… It is a call for black people in this country to unite, to recognize their heritage, to build a sense of community. It is a call for black people to begin to define their own goals, to lead their own organizations and to support those organizations. It is a call to reject the racist institutions and values of this society.The concept of Black Power rests on a fundamental premise: Before a group can enter the open society, it must first close ranks. By this we mean that group solidarity is necessary before a group can operate effectively from a bargaining position of strength in a pluralistic society. Traditionally, each new ethnic group in this society has found the route to social and political viability [capability] through the organization of its own institutions with which to represent its needs within the larger society. Studies in voting behavior specifically, and political behavior generally, have made it clear that politically the American pot has not melted. Italians vote for Rubino over O’Brien; Irish for Murphy over Goldberg, etc. This phenomenon may seem distasteful to some, but it has been and remains today a central fact of the American political system…The point is obvious; black people must lead and run their own organizations. Only black people can convey the revolutionary idea- and it is a revolutionary idea- that black people are able to do things themselves. Only they can help create in the community an aroused and continuing black consciousness that will provide the basis for political strength. In the past, white allies have often furthered white supremacy without the whites involved realizing it, or even wanting to do so. Black people must come together and do things for themselves. They must achieve self-identify and self-determination in order to have their daily needs met.Black Power means, for example, that in Lowndes County, Alabama, a black sheriff can end police brutality. A black tax assessor and tax collector and county board of revenue can lay, collect, and channel tax monies for the building of better roads and schools serving black people. In such areas as Lowndes, where black people have a majority, they will attempt to use power to exercise control. This is what they seek: control. When black people lack a majority, Black Power means proper representation and sharing of control. It means the creation of power bases, of strength, from which black people can press to change local or nationwide patterns of oppression- instead of from weakness.It does not mean merely putting black faces into office. Black visibility is not Black Power. Most of the black politicians around the country today are not examples of Black Power. The power must be that of a community, and emanate from there. The black politicians must start from there. The black politicians must stop being representatives of “downtown” machines, whatever the cost might be in terms of lost patronage and holiday handouts.Black Power recognizes- it must recognize- the ethnic basis of American politics as well as the power-oriented nature of American politics. Black Power therefore calls for black people to consolidate behind their own, so that they can bargain from a position of strength. But while we endorse the procedure of group solidarity and identity for the purpose of attaining certain goals in the body politic, this does not mean that black people should strive for the same kind of rewards (i.e. end results) obtained by the white society. The ultimate values and goals are not domination or exploitation of other groups, but rather an effective share in the total power of the society.Nevertheless, some observers have labeled those who advocate Black Power as racists; they have said that the call for self-identification and self-determination is “racism in reverse” or “black supremacy.” This is a deliberate and absurd lie. There is no analogy- by any stretch of definition or imagination- between the advocates of Black Power and white racists. Racism is not merely exclusion on the basis of race but exclusion for the purpose of subjugating or maintaining subjugation. The goal of the racists is to keep black people on the bottom, arbitrarily and dictatorially, as they have done in this country for over three hundred years. The goal of black self-determination and black self-identity- Black Power- is full participation in the decision-making processes affecting the lives of black people, and recognition of the virtues in themselves as black people…We have outlined the meaning and goals of Black Power; we have also discussed one major thing which it is not. There are others of greater importance. The advocates of Black Power reject the old slogans and meaningless struggle. The language of yesterday is indeed irrelevant: progress, non-violence, integration, fear of “white backlash,” coalition…… For years it has been thought that black people would not literally fight for their lives… The notion apparently stems from the years of marches and demonstrations and sit-ins where black people did not strike back and the violence always came from white mobs. There are many who still sincerely believe in that approach…… Those of us who advocate Black Power are quite clear in our own minds that a “non-violent” approach to civil rights is an approach black people cannot afford and a luxury white people do not deserve. It is crystal clear to us- and it must become so with the white society- that there can be no social order without social justice. White people must be made to understand that they must stop messing with black people, or the blacks will fight back!Next, we must deal with the term “integration.” According to its advocates, social justice will be accomplished by “integrating the Negro into the mainstream institutions of the society from which he has been traditionally excluded.” This concept is based on the assumption that there is nothing of value in the black community and that little of value could be created among black people. The thing to do is siphon off the “acceptable” black people into the surrounding middle-class white community…The racial and cultural personality of the black community must be preserved and that community must win its freedom while preserving its cultural integrity. Integrity includes a pride- in the sense of self-acceptance, not chauvinism- in being black, in the historical attainments and contributions of black people. No person can be healthy, complete and mature if he must deny a part of himself; this is what “integration” has required thus far. This is the essential difference between integration as it is currently practiced and the concept of Black Power. Negro Leaders Speak in Support of Present Goals:In the following excerpt from an article entitled “What Negro Leaders Want Now,” which appeared in the February 24, 1969 issue of US News & World Report, civil rights leaders Whitney young, Roy Innis, John Morsell, Ralph Abernathy, and Floyd McKissick state their present goals for the civil rights movement. Racial integration- the intermingling of black and white people in every phase of life- no longer is stressed by most Negro leaders as an immediate, primary goal. Emphasis has shifted. Today, what Negroes regard as most important are economic goals. They want more and better jobs, good education and training to qualify for those jobs, better housing and greater economic opportunity- including the chance to become business owners and managers as well as wage earners… … Whitney M. Young Jr., executive director of the Urban League, said this to US News & World Report: If I were to assign a priority to Negro needs, I would have to give No. 1 priority to housing. This has become the most critical problem the Negro faces. Without decent housing, family life is threatened, the possibility of good schooling is seriously jeopardized. Jobs are open today to the person who is qualified. But good education is clearly a long time away in the slums… Now, when I talk about housing, I’m not talking just about integrated housing, but about the supply and availability of housing to Negroes. The Urban League does not even use the term integration. We talk of an ‘open society’ where a person is free to choose his neighborhood and his society. The Negro wants this option. It is fascinating to see how many white people have suddenly become fanatically in favor of integration since Negroes started talking about racial separatism. I still believe that white and black Americans need each other. Neither race can go it alone. Integration is always our goal. But the trend is the other way. Whites flee to the suburbs and segregation increases. The Negro will never be able to integrate until those institutions which serve him where he now lives are dramatically improved. When he gets good education, integration will take care of itself. Preoccupation with integration can divert us from developing the resources to achieve it.The Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) in the past has been noted more for militant demonstrations for civil rights than for economic programs. But here is what Roy Innis, the 34-year-old CORE director, said in a talk with a member of the staff of US News & World Report:Economics is the main thing today among Negroes. The priority is on increased ability to do for one’s own self. Welfare and job programs are not enough. We must add the new component of capital investment… What Negroes need is a broader-based ownership. Sometimes this will be community ownership, sometimes corporate and sometimes individual ownership… What we need are some kinds of autonomous and independent units of local control inside a city. Black-controlled schools better reflect the interests of blacks. Even bad white schools are better than bad black schools because in those white schools at least the teaching is oriented toward the white student’s mind and background. But black schools controlled by whites are not oriented to black students. Integration? That is off our list of priorities altogether. Integration is just a dream that may come true down the road someplace. I have no particular desire for it…Among major civil rights organizations, the one putting most emphasis on integration as a major Negro goal of today is the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP):… NAACP officials also put economic programs for Negroes high on their list of what they want from the Nixon Administration. John A. Marshall, deputy executive director of NACCP, told US News & World Report:Negroes pretty generally agree that the one desperate need now is jobs. If private business can provide them, fine. But the Government must become the employer of last resort-either through welfare or work programs… Next to jobs in importance are education and training. Negroes’ education now is not as bad as it used to be, but it is still bad. There is also the problem of union bias. Mr. Morsell, on the question of whether new civil-rights laws are needed, said this: I think it is fair to say that our fundamental citizenship rights have been covered by legislation and court rulings. New needs may develop if evasion persists. But now the question is one of enforcement where Negroes are likely to be most skeptical about the Nixon Administration.The Rev. Ralph David Abernathy, president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, who led the “poor people’s march” on Washington last summer, laid down this list of things that he believes the Nixon Administration should do:Mr. Nixon should first of all end the war in Vietnam, curtail the power of the military-industrial complex, abolish the draft and cut military spending. He should use the Johnson war-tax surcharge for domestic programs. For example, the new Housing Act and Model Cities program should be fully funded. We should have a guaranteed income for the poor, a massive program of job training and full employment, much greater expenditures on education, and a humane welfare program…Floyd B. McKissick resigned as head of CORE last year to devote his full time to enterprises promoting “black economic power” by opening up jobs and business opportunities. One of his projects is to build a new city in North Carolina, to be called “Soul City.” In his office in the Harlem district of NYC, Mr. McKissick told a member of the staff of US News & World Report:What black people wanted in 1954, at the time of the Supreme Court ruling against school segregation, was integration. They thought then that this would solve the problem of racism. It did not. So this is no longer what black people want today. We are no longer worried about this slogan called integration. We are most interested in opportunity- a chance to solve our own problems. Whites can’t solve the problems of this nation’s black people any more. Only blacks can solve their own problems- and the way they can do it is through jobs and business opportunities. Now we talk of building a black economy. Our coming together to build something will make a bigger contribution to American society than our trying to be white…”Touhill, Blanche M. "Controversy Over the Aims and Methods of the Civil Rights Movement." Readings in American History. River Forest, IL: Laidlaw Bros., 1970. 476-84. Print.Brown vs. the Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas Majority Opinion of the Supreme Court in Brown vs. BOE of TopekaInherently UnequalOn May 17, 1954, the United States Supreme Court handed down a landmark decision on segregation in public elementary schools. That case, which consolidated a number of matters on appeal from Kansas, South Carolina, Virginia and Delaware, was titled Brown v. Board of Education. The Court considered criteria beyond the physical facilities and other tangible assets of black and white schools. So, even if the black schools and white schools had substantially equal buildings, curricula, classroom materials, teacher qualifications and salaries, the separate schools still possibly did not offer equal educational opportunities. Turning to the effect of segregation on school children, the Court noted that to separate black children from others of similar age and qualifications solely because of their race generates a feeling of inferiority as to their status in the community that may affect their hearts and minds in a way unlikely ever to be undone. This sense of inferiority affects their motivation to learn and, thus, has a tendency to retard their educational and mental development and to deprive them of some of the benefits they would receive in a racially integrated school system. The Court then held that segregation in public schools was unconstitutional and rejected any language in Plessy that ran contrary to this. So, in this century of change, people once enslaved were unshackled and set free. People once isolated were integrated into society. People once looked down upon returned to lead. And, these leaders guided not just themselves but the entire nation to a better place. A place where people have never been freer. A place where justice has never been fairer. And, a place where the promise of America has never been finer.BROWN v. BOARD OF EDUCATION, (1954)APPEAL FROM THE US DISTRICT COURT FOR THE DISTRICT OF KANSAS.Segregation of white and Negro children in the public schools of a State solely on the basis of race, pursuant to state laws permitting or requiring such segregation, denies to Negro children the equal protection of the laws guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment - even though the physical facilities and other "tangible" factors of white and Negro schools may be equal. (a) The history of the Fourteenth Amendment is inconclusive as to its intended effect on public education. (b) The question presented in these cases must be determined, not on the basis of conditions existing when the Fourteenth Amendment was adopted, but in the light of the full development of public education and its present place in American life throughout the Nation. (c) Where a State has undertaken to provide an opportunity for an education in its public schools, such an opportunity is a right which must be made available to all on equal terms. (d) Segregation of children in public schools solely on the basis of race deprives children of the minority group of equal educational opportunities, even though the physical facilities and other "tangible" factors may be equal. (e) The "separate but equal" doctrine adopted in Plessy v. Ferguson, no place in the field of public education. (f) The cases are restored to the docket for further argument on specified questions relating to the forms of the decrees. MR. CHIEF JUSTICE WARREN delivered the opinion of the Court. These cases come to us from the States of Kansas, South Carolina, Virginia, and Delaware. They are premised on different facts and different local conditions, but a common legal question justifies their consideration together in this consolidated opinion. In each of the cases, minors of the Negro race, through their legal representatives, seek the aid of the courts in obtaining admission to the public schools of their community on a nonsegregated basis. In each instance, they had been denied admission to schools attended by white children under laws requiring or permitting segregation according to race. This segregation was alleged to deprive the plaintiffs of the equal protection of the laws under the Fourteenth Amendment. In each of the cases other than the Delaware case, a three-judge federal district court denied relief to the plaintiffs on the so-called "separate but equal" doctrine announced by this Court in Plessy v. Ferguson, Under that doctrine, equality of treatment is accorded when the races are provided substantially equal facilities, even though these facilities be separate. In the Delaware case, the Supreme Court of Delaware adhered to that doctrine, but ordered that the plaintiffs be admitted to the white schools because of their superiority to the Negro schools. The plaintiffs contend that segregated public schools are not "equal" and cannot be made "equal," and that hence they are deprived of the equal protection of the laws. Because of the obvious importance of the question presented, the Court took jurisdiction. Argument was heard in the 1952 Term, and reargument was heard this Term on certain questions propounded by the Court. Reargument was largely devoted to the circumstances surrounding the adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment in 1868. It covered exhaustively consideration of the Amendment in Congress, ratification by the states, then existing practices in racial segregation, and the views of proponents and opponents of the Amendment. This discussion and our own investigation convince us that, although these sources cast some light, it is not enough to resolve the problem with which we are faced. At best, they are inconclusive. The most avid proponents of the post-War Amendments undoubtedly intended them to remove all legal distinctions among "all persons born or naturalized in the United States." Their opponents, just as certainly, were antagonistic to both the letter and the spirit of the Amendments and wished them to have the most limited effect. What others in Congress and the state legislatures had in mind cannot be determined with any degree of certainty. An additional reason for the inconclusive nature of the Amendment's history, with respect to segregated schools, is the status of public education at that time. In the South, the movement toward free common schools, supported by general taxation, had not yet taken hold. Education of white children was largely in the hands of private groups. Education of Negroes was almost nonexistent, and practically all of the race was illiterate. In fact, any education of Negroes was forbidden by law in some states. Today, in contrast, many Negroes have achieved outstanding success in the arts and sciences as well as in the business and professional world. It is true that public school education at the time of the Amendment had advanced further in the North, but the effect of the Amendment on Northern States was generally ignored in the congressional debates. Even in the North, the conditions of public education did not approximate those existing today. The curriculum was usually rudimentary; ungraded schools were common in rural areas; the school term was but three months a year in many states; and compulsory school attendance was virtually unknown. As a consequence, it is not surprising that there should be so little in the history of the Fourteenth Amendment relating to its intended effect on public education. In the first cases in this Court construing the Fourteenth Amendment, decided shortly after its adoption, the Court interpreted it as proscribing all state-imposed discriminations against the Negro race. The doctrine of "separate but equal" did not make its appearance in this Court until 1896 in the case of Plessy v. Ferguson, supra, involving not education but transportation. American courts have since labored with the doctrine for over half a century. In this Court, there have been six cases involving the "separate but equal" doctrine in the field of public education. In Cumming v. County Board of Education, and Gong Lum v. Rice, the validity of the doctrine itself was not challenged. In more recent cases, all on the graduate school level, inequality was found in that specific benefits enjoyed by white students were denied to Negro students of the same educational qualifications. Missouri ex rel. Gaines v. Canada, Sipuel v. Oklahoma, Sweatt v. Painter, McLaurin v. Oklahoma State Regents, in none of these cases was it necessary to re-examine the doctrine to grant relief to the Negro plaintiff. And in Sweatt v. Painter, supra, the Court expressly reserved decision on the question whether Plessy v. Ferguson should be held inapplicable to public education. In the instant cases, that question is directly presented. Here, unlike Sweatt v. Painter, there are findings below that the Negro and white schools involved have been equalized, or are being equalized, with respect to buildings, curricula, qualifications and salaries of teachers, and other "tangible" factors. Our decision, therefore, cannot turn on merely a comparison of these tangible factors in the Negro and white schools involved in each of the cases. We must look instead to the effect of segregation itself on public education. In approaching this problem, we cannot turn the clock back to 1868 when the Amendment was adopted, or even to 1896 when Plessy v. Ferguson was written. We must consider public education in the light of its full development and its present place in American life throughout the Nation. Only in this way can it be determined if segregation in public schools deprives these plaintiffs of the equal protection of the laws. Today, education is perhaps the most important function of state and local governments. Compulsory school attendance laws and the great expenditures for education both demonstrate our recognition of the importance of education to our democratic society. It is required in the performance of our most basic public responsibilities, even service in the armed forces. It is the very foundation of good citizenship. Today it is a principal instrument in awakening the child to cultural values, in preparing him for later professional training, and in helping him to adjust normally to his environment. In these days, it is doubtful that any child may reasonably be expected to succeed in life if he is denied the opportunity of an education. Such an opportunity, where the state has undertaken to provide it, is a right which must be made available to all on equal terms. We come then to the question presented: Does segregation of children in public schools solely on the basis of race, even though the physical facilities and other "tangible" factors may be equal, deprive the children of the minority group of equal educational opportunities? We believe that it does. In Sweatt v. Painter, supra, in finding that a segregated law school for Negroes could not provide them equal educational opportunities, this Court relied in large part on "those qualities which are incapable of objective measurement but which make for greatness in a law school." In McLaurin v. Oklahoma State Regents, supra, the Court, in requiring that a Negro admitted to a white graduate school be treated like all other students, again resorted to intangible considerations: ". . . his ability to study, to engage in discussions and exchange views with other students, and, in general, to learn his profession." Such considerations apply with added force to children in grade and high schools. To separate them from others of similar age and qualifications solely because of their race generates a feeling of inferiority as to their status in the community that may affect their hearts and minds in a way unlikely ever to be undone. The effect of this separation on their educational opportunities was well stated by a finding in the Kansas case by a court which nevertheless felt compelled to rule against the Negro plaintiffs: "Segregation of white and colored children in public schools has a detrimental effect upon the colored children. The impact is greater when it has the sanction of the law; for the policy of separating the races is usually interpreted as denoting the inferiority of the negro group. A sense of inferiority affects the motivation of a child to learn. Segregation with the sanction of law, therefore, has a tendency to [retard] the educational and mental development of negro children and to deprive them of some of the benefits they would receive in a racial[ly] integrated school system." Whatever may have been the extent of psychological knowledge at the time of Plessy v. Ferguson, this finding is amply supported by modern authority. Any language in Plessy v. Ferguson contrary to this finding is rejected. We conclude that in the field of public education the doctrine of "separate but equal" has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal. Therefore, we hold that the plaintiffs and others similarly situated for whom the actions have been brought are, by reason of the segregation complained of, deprived of the equal protection of the laws guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment. This disposition makes unnecessary any discussion whether such segregation also violates the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Because these are class actions, because of the wide applicability of this decision, and because of the great variety of local conditions, the formulation of decrees in these cases presents problems of considerable complexity. On reargument, the consideration of appropriate relief was necessarily subordinated to the primary question - the constitutionality of segregation in public education. We have now announced that such segregation is a denial of the equal protection of the laws. In order that we may have the full assistance of the parties in formulating decrees, the cases will be restored to the docket, and the parties are requested to present further argument on Questions 4 and 5 previously propounded by the Court for the reargument this Term. The Attorney General of the United States is again invited to participate. The Attorneys General of the states requiring or permitting segregation in public education will also be permitted to appear as amici curiae upon request to do so by September 15, 1954, and submission of briefs by October 1, 1954. It is so ordered. Footnotes In the Kansas case, Brown v. Board of Education, the plaintiffs are Negro children of elementary school age residing in Topeka. They brought this action in the United States District Court for the District of Kansas to enjoin enforcement of a Kansas statute which permits, but does not require, cities of more than 15,000 population to maintain separate school facilities for Negro and white students [1949]. Pursuant to that authority, the Topeka Board of Education elected to establish segregated elementary schools. Other public schools in the community, however, are operated on a nonsegregated basis. The three-judge District Court…found that segregation in public education has a detrimental effect upon Negro children, but denied relief on the ground that the Negro and white schools were substantially equal with respect to buildings, transportation, curricula, and educational qualifications of teachers. The case is here on direct appeal… Trumpet of Conscience: Martin Luther King, Jr.- by Stephen B. OatesFor most African Americans, the Depression had been an unmitigated calamity. An impoverished group to begin with, African Americans, especially southern sharecroppers, suffered worse than any other minority. WWII, however, offered African Americans relief, and they made considerable progress during the conflict. The war accelerated their exodus to the North, as southern blacks sought employment in war-related industry there. At first, white employers refused to hire African-American workers, and the Roosevelt administration did little to stop such discrimination until A. Philip Randolph- the celebrated African American labor leaders- threatened to lead a massive protest march. Roosevelt responded with an executive order that prohibited racial discrimination in defense plants and government agencies alike. By the close of 1944, 2 million African American men and women were working in shipyards, aircraft factories, steel mills, and other defense plants. At the same time, almost 1 million African Americans served in the US armed forces- half of them overseas in segregated outfits. By war’s end, however, some of the army bases at home were partly integrated, and African American sailors were serving on ships with whites. Alas, African Americans soldiers and sailors who fought in a war against Nazi racists returned home to confront massive racial discrimination against them, especially in segregated Dixie. Many of those veterans joined the NAACP, which now had chapters across the South, and became civil rights activists. In the postwar years, President Harry Truman proved to be sympathetic to the plight of African Americans and did much to help them: he established a special committee on civil rights, which worked out an agenda for attacking segregation that continued for two decades. Truman also issued an executive order that ended segregation in the armed forces. Ironically, the military would become the most integrated institution in the USA. The NAACP, meanwhile, continued to battle segregation in case-by-case litigation in the federal courts and marked hard-earned victories against southern white primaries and segregated law schools in the border-states. In May 1954, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund won its most spectacular triumph before the US Supreme Court. In Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, the High Court outlawed segregation in public schools, thus reversing the doctrine of “separate but equal” that had prevailed since Plessy v. Ferguson 58 years earlier. Said the Court: “Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal” and created “a feeling of inferiority” in African American students “that may affect their hearts and minds in a way unlikely ever to be undone.” In one historic blow, the Supreme Court smashed the whole legal superstructure for the idea of racial separateness, knocking down a century and a half of devious rationalizations in defense of the doctrine that African Americans must be kept apart because they were inferior.But the white South obstructed the school decision at every turn. The Alabama legislature “nullified” the Court decision, vowing to preserve white supremacy come what may. Fiery crosses burned against Texas and Florida skies, and random Klan terrorism broke out against African Americans in many parts of Dixie. Faced with stiffening white resistance, the Supreme Court did not order immediate compliance with the Brown decision and called instead for desegregation of public schools “with all deliberate speed.” But the Court offered no guidelines and set no timetable. In 1956, more than 100 southern members of Congress signed a “manifesto” that damned the Court decision and summoned the white South to defy it to the bitter end. Mustering its own legal forces, white officialdom promised to tie up the Brown decision in “a century of litigation.” For African Americans, the road to freedom’s land was elusive indeed. Most Southern African Americans languished in searing poverty and a rigid racial caste system that relegated them to the gutters of society, and kept them away from the pools and out of politics…In 1955, African Americans in the South created an uproar despite the police and the lynchings. That was the year of the Montgomery bus boycott, an event that launched the nonviolent civil rights protest movement of the 1950s/1960s. Many people rose to prominence in the movement, but Martin Luther King Jr., became its most popular and most eloquent spokesman. In this selection, you will walk with King from his birth in Atlanta and his intellectual odyssey in college to the great and impassioned days of the civil rights movement in the 1960s. As you ponder King’s life and significance, consider what writer-historian Garry Wills said of Kind in The Kennedy Imprisonment (1982), “While Washington’s ‘best and brightest’ worked us into Vietnam,” Wills wrote, “an obscure army of virtue arose in the South and took the longest spiritual trip inside a public bathroom or toward the front of a bus. King rallied the strength of broken [men and women], transmuting an imposed squalor into the beauty of chosen suffering. No one did it for his followers. They did it for themselves. Yet, in helping them, he exercised real power, achieved changes that dwarf the moon shot as an American achievement. The ‘Kennedy era’ was really the age of Dr. King.”He was M.L. to his parents, Martin to his wife and friends, Doe to his aides, Reverend to his male parishioners, Little Lord Jesus to adoring churchwomen, De Lawd to his young critics in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and Martin Luther King Jr., to the world. At his pulpit or a public rostrum, he seemed too small for his incomparable oratory and international fame as a civil rights leader and spokesman for world peace. He stood only five feet seven, and had round cheeks, a trim mustache, and sad, glistening eyes- eyes that revealed both his inner strength and his vulnerability.He was born in Atlanta on January 15, 1929, and grew up in the relative comfort of the black middle class. Thus he never suffered the want and privation that plagued the majority of American blacks of his time. His father, a gruff, self-made man, was pastor of Ebenezer Baptist Church and an outspoken member of Atlanta’s black leadership. M.L. joined his father’s church when he was give and came to regard it as his second home. The church defied his world, gave it order and balance, taught him how to “get along with people.” Here M.L. knew who he was- “Reverend King’s boy,” somebody special. At home, his parents and maternal grandmother reinforced his self-esteem, praising him for his precious ways, telling him repeatedly that he was somebody. By age five, he spoke like an adult and had such a prodigious memory that he could recite whole Biblical passages and entire hymns without a mistake. He was acutely sensitive, too, so much so that he worried about all the blacks he saw in Atlanta’s breadlines during the Depression, fearful that their children did not have enough to eat. When his maternal grandmother died, 12 year old M.L. thought it was his fault. Without telling anyone, he had slipped away from home to watch a parade, only to find out when he returned that she had died. He was terrified that God had taken her away as punishment for his “sin.” Guilt-stricken, he tried to kill himself by leaping out of his second-story window. He had a great deal of anger in him. Growing up a black in segregated Atlanta, he felt the full range of southern racial discrimination. He discovered that he had to attend separate, inferior schools, which he sailed through with a modicum of effort, skipping grades as he went. He found out that he- a preacher’s boy- could not sit at lunch counters in Atlanta’s downtown stores. He had to drink from a “colored” water fountain, relieve himself in a rancid “colored” restroom, and ride a rickety “colored” elevator. If he rode a city bus, he had to sit in the back as though he were contaminated. If he wanted to see a movie in a downtown theater, he had to enter through a side door and sit in the “colored” section in the balcony. He discovered that whites referred to blacks as “boys” and “girls” regardless of age. He saw “WHITES ONLY” signs staring back at him in the windows of barber shops and all the good restaurants and hotels, at the YMCA, the city parks, golf courses, swimming pools, and in the waiting rooms of the train and bus stations. He learned that there were even white and black sections of the city and that he resided in “n****r town.” Segregation caused a tension in the boy, a tension between his parents’ injunction (“remember, you are somebody”) and a system that constantly demeaned and insulted him. He struggled with the pain and rage he felt when a white woman in a downtown store slapped him and called him “a little n****r”… when a bus driver called him “a black son-of-a-bitch” and made him surrender his seat to a white… when he stood on the very spot in Atlanta where whites had lynched a black man… when he witnessed nightriding Klansmen beating blacks in the streets. How, he asked defiantly, could he heed the Christian injunction and love a race of people who hated him? In retaliation, he determined “to hate every white person.”Yes, he was angry. In sandlot games, he competed to fiercely that friends could not tell whether he was playing or fighting. He had his share of playground combat, too, and could outwrestle any of his peers. He even rebelled against his father, vowing never to become a preacher like him. Yet he liked the way Daddy King stood up to whites: he told them never to call him a boy and vowed to fight this system until he died.Still, there was another side to M.L., a calmer, sensuous side. He played the violin, enjoyed opera, and relished soul food… By his mid-teens, his voice was the most memorable thing about him. It had changed into a rich and radiant baritone that commanded attention whenever he held forth. A natty dresser, nicknamed “Tweed” because of his fondness for tweed suits, he became a connoisseur of lovely young women. His little brother A.D. remembered how Martin “kept flitting from chick to chick” and was “just about the best jitterbug in town.” At age 15, he entered Morehouse College in Atlanta, wanting somehow to help his people. He thought about becoming a lawyer and even practiced giving trial speeches before a mirror in his room. But thanks largely to Morehouse President Benjamin Mays, who showed him that the ministry could be a respectable forum for ideas, even for social protest, King decided to become a Baptist preacher after all. By the time he was ordained in 1947, his resentment toward whites had softened some, thanks to positive contact with white students on an intercollegiate council. But he hated his segregated world more than ever. Once he had his bachelor’s degree, he went north to study at Crozer Seminary in Philadelphia. In this mostly white school, with its polished corridors and quiet solemnity, King continued to ponder the plight of blacks in America. How, by what method and means, were blacks to improve their lot in a white-dominated country? His study of history, especially of Nat Turner’s slave insurrection, convinced him that it was suicidal for a minority to strike back against a heavily armed majority. For him, voluntary segregation was equally unacceptable, as was accommodation to the status quo. King shuddered at such negative approaches to the race problem. How indeed were blacks to combat discrimination in a country ruled by the white majority?As some other blacks had done, he found his answer in the teachings of Mohandas Gandhi- for young King, the discovery had the force of a conversion experience. Nonviolent resistance, Gandhi taught, meant noncooperation with evil, an idea he got from Henry David Thoreau’s essay “On Civil Disobedience.” In India, Gandhi gave Thoreau’s theory practical application in the form of strikes, boycotts, and protest marches, all conducted nonviolently and all predicated on love for the oppressor and a belief in divine justice. In gaining Indian independence, Gandhi sought not to defeat the British, but to redeem them through love, so as to avoid a legacy of bitterness. Gandhi’s term for this- Satyagraha- reconciled love and force in a single, powerful concept. As King discovered from his studies, Gandhi had embraced nonviolence in part to subdue his own violent nature. This was a profound revelation for King, who had felt much hatred in his life, especially toward whites. Now Gandhi showed him a means of harnessing his anger and channeling it into a positive and creative force for social change. At this juncture, King found mostly theoretical satisfaction in Gandhian nonviolence; he had no plans to become a reformer in the segregated South. Indeed, he seemed destined to a life of the mind, not of social protest. In 1951, he graduated from Crozer and went on to earn a Ph.D. in theology from Boston University, where his adviser pronounced him “a scholar’s scholar” of great intellectual potential. By 1955, a year after the school desegregation decision, King had married comely Coretta Scott and assumed the pastorship of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama. Immensely happy in the world of ideas, he hoped eventually to teach theology at a major university or seminary. But, as King liked to say, the Zeitgeist, or spirit of the age, had other plans for him. In December 1955, Montgomery blacks launched a boycott of the city’s segregated buses and chose the articulate 26 year old minister as their spokesman. As it turned out, he was unusually well prepared to assume the kind of leadership thrust upon him. Drawing on Gandhi’s teachings and example, plus the tenets of his own Christian faith, King directed a nonviolent boycott designed both to end an injustice and redeem his white adversaries through love. When he exhorted blacks to love their enemies, King did not mean to love them as friends or intimates. No, he said, he meant a disinterested love in all humankind, a love that saw the neighbor in everyone it met, a love that sought to restore the beloved community. Such love not only avoided the internal violence of the spirit, but severed the external chain of hatred that only produced more hatred in an endless spiral. If American blacks could break the chain of hatred, King said, true brotherhood could begin. Then posterity would have to say that there had lived a race of people, of black people, who “injected a new meaning into the veins of history and civilization.”During the boycott King imparted his philosophy at twice-weekly mass meetings in the black churches, where overflow crowds clapped and cried as his mellifluous voice swept over them. In these mass meetings King discovered his extraordinary power as an orator. His rich religious imagery reached deep into the black psyche, for religion had been the black people’s main source of strength and survival since slavery days. His delivery was “like a narrative poem,” said a woman journalist who heard him. His voice had such depths of sincerity and empathy that it could “charm your heart right out of your body.” Because he appealed to the best in his people, articulating their deepest hurts and aspirations, black folk began to idolize him; he was their Gandhi.Under his leadership, they stood up to white Montgomery in a remarkable display of solidarity. Pitted against an obdurate city government that blamed the boycott on Communist agitators and resorted to psychological and legal warfare to break it, the blacks stayed off the busses month after month, and walked or rode in a black-operated carpool. When an elderly woman refused the offer of a ride, King asked her, “But don’t your feet hurt?” “Yes,” she replied, “my feet is tired but my soul is rested.” For King, her irrepressible spirit was proof that “a new Negro” was emerging in the South, a Negro with “a new sense of dignity and destiny.” That “new Negro” menaced white supremacists, especially the Ku Klux Klan, and they persecuted King with a vengeance. They made obscene phone calls to his home, sent him abusive, sickening letters, and once even dynamited the front of his house. Nobody was hurt, but King, fearing a race war, had to dissuade angry blacks from violent retaliation. Finally, on November 13, 1956, the US Supreme Court nullified the Alabama laws that enforced segregated buses, and handed King and his boycotters a resounding moral victory. Their protest had captured the imagination of progressive people all over the world and marked a beginning of a southern black movement that would shake the segregated South to its foundations. At the forefront of that movement was a new organization, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), which King and other black ministers formed in 1957, with King serving as its president and guiding spirit. Operating through the southern black church, SCLC sought to enlist the black masses in the freedom struggle by expanding “the Montgomery way” across the South.The “Miracle of Montgomery” changed King’s life, catapulting him into international prominence as an inspiring new moral voice for civil rights. Across the country, blacks and whites alike wrote him letters of encouragement; Time magazine pictured him on its cover; the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and scores of church and civic organizations vied for his services as a speaker. “I am really disturbed how fast all this has happened to me,” King told his wife. “People will expect me to perform miracles for the rest of my life.” But fame had its evil side, too. When King visited New York in 1958, a deranged black woman stabbed him in the chest with a letter opener. The weapon was lodged so close to King’s aorta, the main artery from the heart, that he would have died had he sneezed. To extract the blade, an interracial surgical team had to remove a rib and part of his breastbone in a burst of inspiration, the lead surgeon made the incision over King’s heart in the shape of a cross. That he had not died convinced King that God was preparing him for some larger work in the segregated South. To gain perspective on what was happening there, he made a pilgrimage to India to visit Gandhi’s shrine and the sites of his “War for Independence.” He returned home with an even deeper commitment to nonviolence and a vow to be more humble and ascetic like Gandhi. Yet he was a man of manifold contradictions, this American Gandhi. While renouncing material things and giving nearly all of his extensive honorariums to SCLC, he liked posh hotels and zesty meals with wine, and he was always immaculately dressed in a gray or black suit, white shirt, and tie. While caring passionately for the poor, the downtrodden, and the disinherited, he had a fascination with men of affluence and enjoyed the company of wealthy SCLC benefactors. While trumpeting the glories of nonviolence and redemptive love, he could feel the most terrible anger when whites murdered a black or bombed a black church; he could contemplate giving up, turning America over to the haters of both races, only to dedicate himself anew to his nonviolent faith and his determination to redeem his country.In 1960, he moved his family to Atlanta so that he could devote himself fulltime to SCLC, which was trying to register black voters for the upcoming federal elections. That same year, southern black students launched the sit-in movement against segregated lunch counters, and King not only helped them form the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) but raised money on their behalf. In October he even joined a sit-in protest at an Atlanta department store and went to jail with several students on a trespassing charge. Like Thoreau, King considered jail “a badge of honor.” To redeem the nation and arouse the conscience of the opponent, King explained, you go to jail and stay there. “You have broken a law which is out of line with the moral law and you are willing to suffer the consequences by serving the time.”He did not reckon, however, on the tyranny of racist officials, who clamped him in a malevolent state penitentiary, in a cell for hardened criminals. But state authorities released him when Democratic presidential nominee John F. Kennedy and his brother Robert interceded on King’s behalf. According to many analysts, the episode won critical black votes for Kennedy and gave him the election in November. For King, the election demonstrated what he had long said: that one of the most significant steps a black could take was the short walk to the voting booth. The trouble was that most blacks in Dixie, especially in the Deep South, could not vote even if they so desired. For decades, state and local authorities had kept the mass of black folk off the voting rolls by a welter of devious obstacles and outright intimidation. Through 1961 and 1962, King exhorted President Kennedy to sponsor tough new civil rights legislation that would enfranchise southern blacks and end segregated public accommodations as well. When Kennedy shied away from a strong civil rights commitment, King and his lieutenants took matters into their own hands, orchestrating a series of southern demonstrations to show the world the brutality of segregation. At the same time, King stumped the country, drawing on all his powers of oratory to enlist the black masses and win white opinion to his cause. Everywhere he went his message was the same. The civil rights issue, he said, is an eternal moral issue that will determine the destiny of our nation and our world. As we seek our full rights, we hope to redeem the soul of our country. For it is our country, too, and we will win our freedom because the sacred heritage of America and the eternal will of God are embodied in our echoing demands. We do not intend to humiliate the white man, but to win him over through the strength of our love. Ultimately, we are trying to free all of us in America- Negroes from the bonds of segregation and shame, whites form the bonds of bigotry and fear. We stand today between two worlds- the dying old order and the emerging new. With men of ill-will greeting this change with cries of violence, of interposition and nullification, some of us may get beaten. Some of us may even get killed. But if you are cut down in a movement designed to save the soul of a nation, no other death could be more redemptive. We must realize that changes does not roll in ‘on the wheels of inevitability’ but comes through struggle. So ‘let us be those creative dissenters who will call our beloved nation to a higher destiny, to a new plateau of compassion, to a more noble expression of humaneness. That message worked like magic among America’s long-suffering blacks. Across the South, across America, they rose in unprecedented numbers to march and demonstrate with Martin Luther King. His singular achievement was that he brought the black masses into the freedom struggle for the first time. He rallied the strength of broken men and women, helping them overcome a lifetime of fear and feelings of inferiority. After segregation had taught them all their lives that they were nobody, King taught them that they were somebody. Because he made them believe in themselves and in “the beauty of chosen suffering,” he taught them how to straighten their backs (“a man can’t ride you unless your back is bent”) and confront those who oppressed them. Through the technique of nonviolent resistance, he furnished them something no previous black leader had been able to provide. He showed them a way of controlling their pent-up anger, as he had controlled his own, and using it to bring about constructive change.The mass demonstrations King and SCLC choreographed in the South produced the strongest civil rights legislation in American history. This was the goal of King’s major southern campaign from 1963 to 1965. He would single out some notoriously segregated city with white officials prone to violence, mobilize the local blacks with songs, scripture readings, and rousing oratory in black churches, and then lead them on protest marches conspicuous for their grace and moral purpose. Then he and his aides would escalate the marches, increase their demands, even fill up the jails, until they brought about a moment of “creative tension,” when whites would either agree to negotiate or resort to violence. If they did the latter, King would thus expose the brutality inherent in segregation and… stab the national conscience so [much] that the federal government would be forced to intervene with corrective measures.The technique succeeded brilliantly in Birmingham, Alabama in 1963. Here Police Commissioner Eugene “Bull” Connor, in full view of reporters and television cameras, turned firehoses and police dogs on the marching protestors. Revolted by such ghastly scenes, stricken by King’s own searching eloquence and the bravery of his unarmed followers, Washington eventually produced the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which desegregated public facilities- the thing King had demanded all along from Birmingham. Across the South, the “WHITES ONLY” signs that had hurt and enraged him since boyhood now came down.Although SNCC and others complained that King had a Messiah complex and was trying to monopolize the civil rights movement, his technique worked with equal success in Selma, Alabama in 1965. Building on a local movement there, King and his staff launched a drive to gain southern blacks the unobstructed right to vote. The violence he exposed in Selma- the beating of black marchers by state troopers and deputized possemen, the killing of a young black deacon and a white Unitarian minister- horrified the country. When King called for support, thousands of ministers, rabbis, priests, nuns, students, lay leaders, and ordinary people- black and white alike- rushed to Selma from all over the country and stood with King in the name of human liberty. Never in the history of the movement had so many people of all faiths and classes come to the southern battleground. The Selma campaign culminated in a dramatic march over the Jefferson Davis Highway to the state capital of Montgomery. Along the way, impoverished local blacks stared incredulously at the marching, singing, flag waving spectacle moving by. When the column reached one dusty crossroads, an elderly black woman ran out from a group of old folk, kissed King breathlessly, and ran back crying, “I done kissed him! The Martin Luther King! I done kissed the Martin Luther King!”In Montgomery, first capital and much-heralded “cradle” of the Confederacy, King led an interracial throng of 25,000- the largest civil rights demonstration the South had ever witnessed- up Dexter Avenue with banners waving overhead. The pageant was as ironic as it was extraordinary, for it was up Dexter Avenue that Jefferson Davis’s first inaugural parade had marched, and [it was] in the portico of the capitol [that] Davis had taken his oath of office as president of the slave-based Confederacy. Now, in the spring of 1965, Alabama blacks- most of them descendants of slaves- stood massed at the same statehouse, singing a new rendition of “We Shall Overcome,” the anthem of the civil rights movement…Then, watched by a cordon of state troopers and the statue of Jefferson Davis himself, King mounted a trailer. His vast audience listened, transfixed, as his words rolled and thundered over the loudspeaker: “My people, my people listen. The battle is in our hands... We must come to see the end we seek is a society at peace with itself, a society that can live with its conscience. That day will be a day not of the white man, not of the black man. That will be the day of man as man.” And that day was not long in coming, King said, whereupon he launched into the immortal refrains of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” crying out, “Our God if marching on! Glory, glory hallelujah!”Aroused by the events in Alabama, Washington produced the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which outlawed impediments to black voting and empowered the attorney general to supervise federal elections in seven southern states where blacks were kept off the rolls. At the time, political analysts almost unanimously attributed the act to King’s Selma campaign. Once federal examiners were supervising voter registration in all troublesome southern areas, blacks were able to get on the rolls and vote by the hundreds of thousands, permanently altering the pattern of southern and national politics. In the end, the powerful civil rights legislation generated by King and his tramping legions wiped out statutory racism in American and realized at least the social and political promise of emancipation a century before. But King was under no illusion that legislation alone could bring on the brave new America he so ardently championed. Yes, he said, laws and their vigorous enforcement were necessary to regulate destructive habits and actions, and to protect blacks and their rights. But laws could not eliminate the “fears, prejudice, pride, and irrationality” that were barriers to a truly integrated society, to peaceful intergroup and interpersonal living. Such a society could only be achieved when people accepted that inner, invisible law that etched on their hearts the conviction “that all men are brothers and that love is mankind’s most potent weapon for personal and social transformation. True integration will be achieved by true neighbors who are willingly obedient to unenforceable obligations.” Even so, the Selma campaign was the movement’s finest hour, and the Voting Rights Act the high point of a broad civil rights coalition that included the federal government, various white groups, and all the other civil rights organizations in addition to SCLC. King himself had best expressed the spirit and aspirations of that coalition when, on August 28, 1963, standing before the Lincoln Memorial, he electrified an interracial crowd of 250,000 with perhaps his greatest speech, “I Have a Dream,” in which he described in rhythmic, hypnotic cadences his vision of an integrated America. Because of his achievements and moral vision, he won the 1964 Nobel Peace Prize, at 34 the youngest recipient in Nobel history.Still, King paid a high price for his fame and his cause. He suffered from stomachaches and insomnia, and even felt guilty about all the tributes he received, all the popularity he enjoyed. Born in relative material comfort and given a superior education, he did not think he had earned the right to lead the impoverished black masses. He complained, too, that he no longer had a personal self and that sometimes he did not recognize the Martin Luther people talked about. Lonely, away from home for protracted periods, beset with temptation, he slept with other women, for some of whom he had real feeling. His sexual transgressions only added to his guilt, for he knew he was imperiling his cause and hurting himself and those he loved.Alas for King, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover found out about the black leader’s infidelities. The director already abhorred King, certain that Communist spies influenced him and masterminded his demonstrations. Hoover did not think blacks capable of organizing such things, so Communists had to be behind them and King as well. As it turned out, a lawyer in King’s inner circle and a man in SCLC’s NY officer did have Communist backgrounds, a fact that only reinforced Hoover’s suspicions about King. Under Hoover’s orders, FBI agents conducted a ruthless crusade to destroy King’s reputation and drive him broken and humiliated from public life. Hoover’s men tapped King’s phones and bugged his hotel rooms; they compiled a prurient monograph about his private life and showed it to various editors, public officials, and religious and civil leaders; they spread the word, Hoover’s word, that King was not only a reprobate but a dangerous subversive with Communist associations.King was scandalized and frightened by the FBI’s revelations of his extramarital affairs. Luckily for him, no editor, not even a racist one in the South, would touch the FBI’s salacious materials. Public officials such as Robert Kennedy were shocked, but argued that King’s personal life did not affect his probity as a civil rights leader. Many blacks, too, declared that what he did in private was his own business. Even so, King vowed to refrain from further affairs- only to succumb again to his own human frailties.As for the Communist charge, King retorted that he did not need any Russians to tell him when someone was standing on his neck; he could figure that out by himself. To mollify his political friends, however, King did banish from SCLC the two men with Communist backgrounds (later he resumed ties with the lawyer, a loyal friend, and let Hoover be damned). He also denounced Communist in no uncertain terms. It was, he believed, profoundly and fundamentally evil, an atheistic doctrine no true Christian could ever embrace. He hated the dictatorial Soviet state, too, whose “crippling totalitarianism” subordinated everything- religion, art, music, science, and the individual- to its terrible yoke. True, Communism stated with men like Karl Marx who were “aflame with a passion for social justice.” Yet King faulted Marx for rejecting God and the spiritual in human life. “The great weakness in Karl Marx is right here,” King once told his staff, and he went on to describe his ideal Christian commonwealth in Hegelian terms: “Capitalism fails to realize that life is social. Marxism fails to realize that life is individual. Truth is found neither in the rugged individualism of capitalism nor in the impersonal collectivism of Communism. The kingdom of God is found in a synthesis that combines the truths of these two opposites. Now there is where I leave Brother Marx and move on toward the kingdom.”But how to move on after Selma was a perplexing question King never successfully answered. After the devastating Watts riot in August 1966, he took his movement into the racially troubled urban North, seeking to help the suffering black poor in the ghettos. In 1966, over the fierce opposition of some of his own staff, he launched a campaign to end the black slums in Chicago and forestall rioting there. But the campaign foundered because King seemed unable to devise a coherent anti-slum strategy, because Mayor Richard Daley and his black acolytes opposed him bitterly, and because white America did not seem to care. King did lead open-housing marches into segregated neighborhoods in Chicago, only to encounter furious mobs who waved Nazi banners, threw bottles and bricks, and screamed [about killing him]… “I’ve been in many demonstrations all across the South, “ he told reporters, “but I can say that I have never seen- even in Mississippi and Alabama- mobs as hostile and as hate-filled as I’ve seen in Chicago.” Although King prevented a major riot there and wrung important concessions from City Hall, the slums remained, as wretched and seemingly unsolvable as ever.That same year, angry young militants in SNCC and the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) renounced King’s teachings- they were sick and tired of “De Lawd” telling them to love white people and work for integration. Now they advocated “Black Power,” black separatism, even violent resistance to liberate blacks in America. SNCC even banished whites from its ranks and went on to drop “nonviolent” from its name and to lobby against civil rights legislation.Black Power repelled the older, more conservative black organizations such as the NAACP and the Urban League, and fragmented the civil rights movement beyond repair. King, too, argued that black separatism was chimerical, even suicidal, and that nonviolence remained the only workable way for black people. “Darkness cannot drive out darkness,” he reasoned: “only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that.” If every other black in American turned to violence, King warned, then he would still remain the lone voice preaching that it was wrong. Nor was SCLC going to reject whites as SNCC had done. “There have been too many hymns of hope,” King said, “too many anthems of expectation, too many deaths, too many dark days of standing over graves of those who fought for integration for us to turn back now. We must still sing ‘Black and White Together, We Shall Overcome.’”In 1967, King himself broke with the older black organizations over the ever-widening war in Vietnam. He had first objected to American escalation in the summer of 1965, arguing that the Nobel Peace Prize and his role as a Christian minister compelled him to speak out for peace. Two years later, with almost half a million Americans- a disproportionate number of them poor blacks- fighting in Vietnam, King devoted whole speeches to America’s “immoral” war against a tiny country on the other side of the globe. His stance provoked a fusillade of criticism from all directions- from the NAACP, the Urban League, white and black political figures, Newsweek, Life, Time, and the NY Times, all telling him to stick to civil rights. Such criticism hurt him deeply. When he read the Time’s editorial against him, he broke down and cried. But he did not back down. “I’ve fought too long and too hard now against segregated accommodations to end up segregating my moral concerns,” he told his critics. “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” The fall of 1967 was a terrible time for King, the lowest ebb in his civil rights career. Everybody seemed to be attacking him- young black militants for his stubborn adherence to nonviolence, moderate and conservative blacks, labor leaders, liberal white politicians, the White House, and the FBI for his stand on Vietnam. Two years had passed since King had produced a nonviolent victory, and contributions to SCLC had fallen off sharply. Black spokesman Adam Clayton Powell, who had once called King the greatest Negro in America, now derided him as Martin Loser King. The incessant attacks began to irritate him, creating such anxiety and depression that his friends worried about his emotional health.Worse still, the country seemed dangerously polarized. On one side, backlashing whites argued that the ghetto explosions had “cremated” nonviolence and that white people had better arm themselves against black rioters. On the other side, angry blacks urged their people to “kill the Honkies” and burn the cities down. All around King, the country was coming apart in a cacophony of hate and reaction. Had America lost the will and moral power to save itself? He wondered. There was such rage in the ghetto and such bigotry among whites that he feared a race war was about to break out. He felt he had to do something to mount a new campaign that would halt the drift to violence in the black world and combat stiffening white resistance, a nonviolent action that would “transmute the deep rage of the ghetto into a constructive and creative force.”Out of his deliberations sprang a bold and daring project called the poor people’s campaign. The master plan, worked out by February 1968, called for SCLC to bring an interracial army of poor people to Washington, DC to dramatize poverty before the federal government. For King, just turned 39, the time had come to employ civil disobedience against the national government itself. Ultimately, he was projecting a genuine class movement that he hoped would bring about meaningful changes in American society- changes that would redistribute economic and political power and end poverty, racism, “the madness of militarism,” and war.In the midst of his preparations, King went to Memphis, Tennessee, to help black sanitation workers there who were striking for the right to unionize. On the night of April 3, with a storm thundering outside, he told a black audience that he had been to the mountaintop and had seen what lay ahead. “I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight that we as a people will get to the promised land.” The next afternoon, when King stepped out on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel, an escaped white convict named James Earl Ray, stationed in a nearby building, took aim with a high-powered rifle and blasted King into eternity. Subsequent evidence linked Ray to white men in the St. Louis area who had offered “hit” money for King’s life. For weeks after the shooting, King’s stricken country convulsed in grief, contrition, and rage. While there were those who cheered his death, the NY Times called it a disaster to the nation, the London Times an enormous loss to the world. In Tanzania, Reverend Trevor Huddleston, expelled from South Africa for standing against apartheid, declared King’s death the greatest single tragedy since the assassination of Gandhi in 1948, and said it challenged the complacency of the Christian Church all over the globe.On April 9, with 120 million Americans watching on television, thousands of mourners- black and white alike- gathered in Atlanta for the funeral of a man who had never given up his dream of creating a symphony of brotherhood on these shores. As a black man born and raised in segregation, he had had every reason to hate America and to grow up preaching cynicism and retaliation. Instead, he had loved the country passionately and had sung of her promise and glory more eloquently than anyone of his generation. They buried him in Atlanta’s South View Cemetery, then blooming with dogwood and fresh green boughs of spring. On his crypt, hewn into the marble, were the words of an old Negro spiritual he had often quoted: “Free at Last, Free at Last, Thank God Almighty I’m Free at Last.” Oates, Stephen B. "Trumpet of Conscience: Martin Luther King Jr." Portrait of America. Vol. 2. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1995. 362-75. Print.The Odyssey of Malcolm X- by Lawrence B. GoodheartWhile Martin Luther King Jr., sought to end racial oppression through nonviolent resistance, redemptive love, and racial integration, a second approach- turned 180 degrees- was taking root in black America. This approach called for violent self-defense, black supremacy, and black separation to redress African American grievances. The chief product of this view was Malcolm X, christened Malcolm Little, whose brutal experiences while growing up in the North rivaled those of African Americans who grew up in Dixie. As a Black Muslim, Malcolm was a savage critic of King’s philosophy and technique of nonviolence. “The white man pays Rev. Martin Luther King, subsidizes Rev Martin Luther King, so that Rev. Martin Luther King can continue to teach the Negro to be defenseless,” Malcolm charged in 1963. “That’s what you mean by nonviolence, be defenseless. Be defenseless in the face of one of the most cruel beasts that has ever taken a people into captivity. That’s the American white man.” What was the solution to the racial problem? It was not, Malcolm argued, the turn-the-other-cheek philosophy of “ignorant Negro preachers.” It was the teachings of Elijah Muhammad, the leader of the Black Muslims, who held that African Americans have the same right to defend themselves as whites, that Western society is sick and disinteresting, that God is about to eliminate the white man because he has never been a brother to anybody, and that African Americans must separate themselves entirely from this “sinking ship” and concentrate on improving themselves. Although they offered rival solutions to America’s race troubles, King and Malcolm still respected one another. King met Malcolm once in Washington and thought him very articulate, with a great concern for the problems African Americans faced as a race. When Malcolm, for his part, visited Selma during King’s 1965 campaign, he pointed out that “I didn’t come to Selma to make his job difficult. I really did come thinking that I could make it easier. If the white people realize what the alternative is, perhaps they will be more willing to hear Dr. King.”By then, Malcolm had moderated his views on the inherent evil of whites- if not on the basic racism of American society. Two and one-half weeks after he visited Selma, this proud and brilliant man was assassinated by African American gunmen in NYC, and King lamented that Malcolm was a victim of the violence in America that had spawned him. Three years later, James Earl Ray murdered King himself in Memphis, Tennessee. Appealing mainly to the bitter, alienated African Americans of the northern ghetto, Malcolm X never reached most African Americans as King did. As Peter Goldman, author of Malcolm X (1978), has noted, the established civil rights organizations all shunned Malcolm, and most whites and many African Americans regarded him as “a kind of spiritual outlaw.” But his influence increased tremendously after the appearance of his posthumous Autobiography (1965), a powerful, compassionate account of African American life in the northern ghettos. Malcolm helped inspire a new consciousness- a bold and assertive racial pride- in the young African Americans of his and later generations. That influence is summed up in the funeral scene in Spike Lee’s epochal motion picture, Malcolm X. In that scene, Ossie Davis says in his eulogy: “Malcolm was our manhood, our living black manhood. This was his meaning to his people. And in honoring him we honor the best in ourselves.”The black search for identify in the United States has been well put by the poet Robert Penn Warren: “Alienated from the world in which he is born and from the country of which he is a citizen yet surrounded by the successful values of that world, and country, how can the Negro define himself?” At the heart of the civil rights and black power movements of the 1950s and 1960s was the defining of the individual and collective identities of members of the largest racial minority in the United States. During what recently has been labeled a “Second Reconstruction,”” critical constitutional, legal, and federal-state relationships were reordered to promote equality under the law regardless of race. At the same time, there was a psychological revolution, a popular transformation of African-American identity from a culturally sanctioned racial inferiority to a black assertion of pride, beauty, and power.The odyssey of Malcolm X was a search for “a definition of himself and his relationship to his people, his country, and the world,” according to sociologist John H. Clarke. When Malcolm stated that “the black man in America has been robbed by the white man of his culture, of his identity, of his soul, of his self,” he conflated his own experience with that of his people; his odyssey represented the militant black search for identity in the early 1960s. His individual rage spoke directly to the frustration of other African-Americans, especially urban ghetto residents- the black underclass- for whom the promise of civil rights legislation and racial integration offered little prospect of improving their degraded living conditions.Public fascination with Malcolm cut across class and racial lines: The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965) has sold over two million copies and has become established as a modern classic. Together with his extensive speeches, interviews, and recollections by associates, the Autobiography as narrated to Alex Haley captures the dramatic changes in Malcolm’s life. Haley’s empathy for Malcolm served to capture the style and substance of the public man. After an initial period of suspicion and distrust, the Malcolm-Haley collaboration developed into what resembled a psychoanalytic session. As Haley patiently prompted him, Malcolm recalled his past. Despite distortion, inaccuracy, and what historian Stephen J. Whitfield calls, “impression management,” the Autobiography is useful for the psychological reality it uncovers.Psychoanalyst Erik H. Erikson defined the psychological core of an individual as identity- “a subjective sense of an invigorating sameness and continuity.” Yet he was careful to stress that the development of a person’s identity over time is subject to change that must be understood within a broad cultural context. His biographies of Martin Luther and Mahatma Gandhi emphasized the interconnection between the life history of the subject and the historical moment, a linkage that could be momentous when an individual’s psychic needs were resolved in a manner that crystallized communal aspirations. Similarly, the shaping of Malcolm’s sense of self as a counterpart to the historic oppression of African-Americans constitutes a central theme in his life, particularly the months before his murder, when Malcolm was an isolated figure whom the white establishment feared, civil rights organizations shunned, and Black Muslims damned. Malcolm’s resolution of his lifelong quest for a meaningful black identity in the United States was thus only partially achieved. Nevertheless, the Eriksonian model, if applied selectively, illuminates the common g round where individual action, collective aspirations, and the historic possibility for change converge in the four major stages of Malcolm’s identity, appropriately marked by name changes: “surrendered identity,” Malcolm Little; “negative identity,” Big Red; “fundamentalism,” Malik El-Shabazz; and “beyond fundamentalism,” El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz. SURRENDERED IDENTITY:Malcolm’s “earliest vivid memory” was as a four-year-old in 1929 “being suddenly snatched away into a frightening confusion of pistol shots and shouting and smoke and flames.” The Lansing, Michigan equivalent of the KKK had burned his family’s house down. Malcolm’s recollection is a violent example of what Erikson termed a surrendered racial identity, historically “the fate of the black citizenry who were kept in their place so as to constitute what slaves meant besides cheap labor- the inferior identity to be superior to.” Malcolm’s childhood memories reveal a life representative of the collective African-American experience as he became ensnared in the racist perversion, as Erikson described it, of “light-clean-clever-white” and “dark-dirty-dumb-n****r”. His father, Earl Little- a tall, very dark-skinned man from Georgia with little formal education- used his itinerant Baptist ministry to preach the racial pride of Marcus Garvey’s United Negro Improvement Association. In contrast, his mother, Louise, “looked like a white woman” and was educated. Her shame was her father, an unknown white rapist. The mark of his grandfather was visited on Malcolm; of eight children, he stood apart with his reddish-brown color. Earl and Louise behaved towards Malcolm in antithetical ways because of his color. Of all his children, Earl took only Malcolm to Garveyite meetings, while Louise told him, “Let the sun shine on you so you can get some color.” Earl saw Malcolm’s complexion as a blessing in the spirit of the adage that “white is right; if you’re brown, stick around; but if you’re black, step back.” Louise, however, favored her dark-skinned children and disparaged Malcolm’s lighter color as an unwanted reminder of her white father. Malcolm’s acute analysis of the effect of racism on the African-American psyche may well have developed out of his childhood experience of being alternatively favored and censured for his complexion. When Malcolm was six years old, vigilantes killed Earl, the fourth of six brothers to be killed by whites, for his Garveyite activities. As an adult, Malcolm’s advocacy of the right to aggressive self-defense and his disavowal of nonviolent resistance developed from such memories of black victimization. Widowed, Louise exemplified the plight of impoverished female heads of household during the Great Depression. Racial discrimination, menial women’s work, and rampant unemployment meant starvation for the Little family in 1934. As Malcolm remembered it, “We would be so hungry we were dizzy.” Unable to provide for her offspring, Louise turned to state relief, a degrading condition that led to her eventual commitment to a public mental institution. Her children, including 12 year old Malcolm, became wards of the state.The difficulties of growing up black in white-dominated communities provided Malcolm with a perspective that later caused him to denigrate the civil rights goal of racial integration as woefully na?ve and illusionary. Whites so routinely called him “n****r” that he thought it normal. Under the supervision of a white couple who ran his detention home, Malcolm was treated kindly but condescendingly. He remembered, “They didn’t give me credit for having the same sensitivity, intellect, and understanding that they would have been ready and willing to recognize in a white boy in my position.” He also learned as a part of a growing sexual and racial awareness, through “some kind of psychic message,” that he was not to dance with white girls at school parties. Yet he knew that furtive interracial sexual liaisons occurred in town. Malcolm was in white society but was restricted to its margins.Nevertheless, Malcolm performed well through seventh grade; he was elected class president, played basketball, and was a good student. Then his English teacher, Mr. Ostrowsku, ended Malcolm’s adolescent dreams of becoming a lawyer by saying, “We all here like you, you know that. But you’ve got to be realistic about being a n****r. A lawyer- that’s no realistic goal for a n****r.” The teacher suggested carpentry as the trade appropriate for Malcolm. The experience, Malcolm later reflected, was “the first major turning point in my life.” Even though he believed that he was smarter than nearly all his white classmates he understood that his options were limited. The white man had initiated the black boy into a racial rite of passage. The term “n****r” predestined Malcolm’s consignment to the nether world of the racial caste system of the United States.NEGATIVE IDENTITY:The encounter with Ostrowski marked an identity crisis, a racist preemption of young Malcolm’s self-perception. Erikson explained that the adolescent “must detect some meaningful resemblance between what he has come to see in himself and what his sharpened awareness tells him others judge and expect him to be.” Knowing that his efforts to aspire to white standards were futile, Malcolm fatalistically responded to Ostrowski’s pronouncement. He fled Michigan for a relative’s home in the Boston ghetto, a migration route to the urban East traditionally followed by alienated Midwestern youth. During his late teenage years, he immersed himself in the hustling subculture of the Roxbury and Harlem ghettos where the lanky Malcolm was called Big Red.The Autobiography, Malcolm cautioned, was not intended to “titillate” the reader with “how bad, how evil” a hustler Malcolm was but to show that “in every big city ghetto tens of thousands of yesterday’s and today’s drop-outs hold body and soul together by dome form of hustling in the same way [he] did.” The ghetto institutionalized racism, not only socially and economically but psychologically as well. High unemployment, deteriorated housing, inadequate health care, blighted schools, drug addiction, and rampant crime turned the American dream into a living nightmare. Historically, the European-American community has often defined its success by comparison with African-American failure and subordination; in effect, Northern ghettos replicate antebellum Southern plantations. Erikson discussed the nature of racial victimization: “The oppressor has a vested interest in the negative identity of the oppressed because that negative identity is a projection of his own unconscious negative identity.” Blacks served whites as psychic scapegoats, readily identifiable and culturally sanctioned…Barred from emulating dominant cultural ideals, the ghetto hustler of the 20th century sought self-respect through illicit activities on the margins of society. Sixteen-year-old Malcolm spurned the hard-earned bourgeois respectability of Roxburry’s Hill Negroes for the sensual pleasure of the dance-hall crowd at Roseland. Shorty, an older Michigan emigrant, instructed his young protégé in the hustler’s craft. As a shoeshine boy, Malcolm not only snapped a polishing cloth but satisfied his customers’ needs for alcohol, marijuana, condoms, and prostitutes. He eventually graduated into numbers running, drug selling… and armed robbery- all part of an underground economy based in the ghetto. Under Shorty’s tutelage, Malcolm was metamorphosed into a hipster, the “Harlem jigaboo archetype.” He flaunted his zoot suit with its Punjab pants, dangling gold chain, and long coat. A wide-brimmed hat and pointed orange shoes completed his defiant caricature of formal dress and rejection of middle-class standards. Using a homemade concoction that included lye, he painfully straightened his… hair to make it look “regular,” like a white man’s hair. It was, he later remembered, his ‘first really big step toward self-degradation.” On one desperate occasion when the winter cold had frozen the water pipes, he had to wash the burning lye off his scalp by dunking his head into a toilet. The image of becoming excrement itself, disgusted black refuse that should be flushed away from the sight of decent people, was not lost on the older Malcolm. Outrageous adornment served to mark Big Red’s entry into an underworld and outwardly compensated for his sense of racial inferiority…Further, he exploited the imagery of the “big black buck” to affirm his self-worth in a society that at once denigrated and feared him. He abandoned Laura, a sheltered and studious black girl, for Sophia, a blond white woman. Big Red then “paraded” Sophia, who was “a status symbol of the first order” among black men in the ghetto. By attracting a white woman, he had validated himself as the equal of any white man. In turn, Sophia sought the “taboo lust” personified by the ghetto hustler. Each responded eagerly to the culturally forbidden pleasures the other represented… Malcolm’s experiences in the netherworld of interracial sexual liaisons led to disgust with the moral hypocrisy of whites, to the adoption of a puritanical code of conduct, and to a persistent suspicion of women. Although Big Red defied white society, the hustler’s life was short and self-destructive. The common predatory allusions in Malcolm’ rhetoric and his lifelong habit of never sitting with his back to a door dated from these combative days on the ghetto streets. Pursued by police, gangsters, and Sophia’s irate husband, he felt “everything was building up, closing in… [He] was trapped in so many cross turns.” Drug addiction muddled his thought; the ever-present pistol foreshadowed a violent end. “I had gotten to the point,” he reflected, “where I was walking on my own coffin.” Finally, carelessness led to his arrest. A Massachusetts court sentenced him to 10 years incarceration for burglary- an excessive sentence, Malcolm believed, to punish him for his relationship with Sophia. Not quite 21 years old, he had “sunk to the very bottom of the American white man’s society.” Big Red had been walled in.FUNDAMENTALISM:Seven years spent in prison forced the young man to turn inward. His incarceration approximated what Erikson defined as a psychosocial moratorium, a period of delaying adult commitments and experimenting with roles in a youthful search for a social niche. Although the options offered in the penitentiary were restricted, Malcolm likened prison to an intense college experience, an environment conductive to self-education and self-examination. In 1947, Malcolm came under the influence of an older black convict, Bimbi, the prison’s scholar and sage. The respect Bimbi gained with his reasoned arguments made Malcolm realize the futility of his own thoughtless rebelliousness. With Bimbi’s encouragement, he took correspondence courses to improve his command of language. In addition, Malcolm became a “fanatic fan” of Jackie Robinson, who had broken baseball’s color barrier. Malcolm began to appreciate that there were more effective ways to cope with a racist society than his previous dead-end roles.In 1948, Malcolm underwent a momentous religious conversion. His brothers and sisters gradually won him over to the teachings of the Nation of Islam, presented as the “natural religion for the black man.” Malcolm said, “The first time I heard the Honorable Elijah Muhammad’s statement, ‘The white man is the devil,’ if just clicked.” The powerful appeal of Elijah Muhammad to the black underclass derived from the origins of the Nation of Islam in Detroit during the Great Depression. The Nation of Islam preached black supremacy, racial separatism through the formation of an African-American nation, social uplift, and economic self-reliance. Believing that divine wrath would soon destroy the evil white race, Elijah Muhammad became the savior of America’s blacks trapped in a white Babylon. Elijah Muhammad’s teachings were a fusion of bourgeois aspirations with the millennialism of racial redemption. According to the demonology of the Nation of Islam, white devils had been created to spite God and his favored people, the black tribe of Shabazz. This dogma provided an affirmation to blacks by a denigration of whites; the oppressed projected their negative identity onto the oppressor where it could be scorned. Elijah Muhammad had imaginatively inverted the axioms of white racism.The doctrine of the Nation of Islam represented a fundamentalist world view, which Erikson called “totalism” and defined as “something you can totally identify with or against, a stable reference point against which you can know who you are.” The Black Muslim’s ideological certainty spurred Malcolm to turn against his past. The sense of being saved gave Malcolm the emotional strength to remake himself. He read voraciously, studied the dictionary, and devoured words to fill an internal void. He joined the prison debating society and learned to use language to expose the white conspiracy against blacks. His extraordinary rapport with audiences of the black underclass derived from the power of rhetoric, a modern example of the oral tradition of African-American culture. In his powerful oratory, words were weapons.The doctrinal message of the Nation of Islam was accompanied by the personal regeneration of its downtrodden members, beginning with deletion of the slavemaster’s surname; Malcolm Little became Malcolm X. The faithful practiced what Malcolm preached in 1960 to a Harlem street audience of several thousand: “Stop fornication, adultery, and prostitution. Elevate the black woman; respect and protect her. Let us rid ourselves of immoral habits and God will be with us to protect and guide us.” Thus was created a gospel of personal cleanliness, hard work, and small business entrepreneurship that acculturated drug addicts, ex-convicts, prostitutes, and others of the ghetto underclass into bourgeois behavior patterns.After his release from prison in 1952, Malcolm increasingly served as the principal spokesman for the reclusive, asthmatic prophet, whom he revered as his personal redeemer: “He had rescued men when I was a convict; Mr. Muhammad had trained me in his home, as if I was his son.” There was, however, an ambivalence in their emotionally charged relationship, which resembled that of father and son. The older man, prodded by envious leaders in the Chicago headquarters, resented Malcolm’s growing prominence, while the dynamic young man had matured beyond the simple fundamentalism of his withdrawn mentor. By 1959, the mass media had discovered the electrifying presence of Minister Malcolm X and the alarming doctrine of the sect they called the Black Muslims, as exhibited in a CBS television documentary, The Hate That Hate Produced.Malcolm’s espousal of the Muslim doctrine of racial separation, black superiority, and the right of violent self-defense clashed with the emerging mainstream civil rights movement represented by the National Association of the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the National Urban League, and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). The image of white racists assaulting defenseless blacks who proposed “to love their enemy” and “to turn the other cheek” perpetuated in his mind the stereotype of the passive Negro, the Uncle Tom. He later explained, “Any time you know you’re within the law, within your legal rights, within your moral rights, in accord with justice, then die for what you believe in. But don’t die alone. Let your dying be reciprocal. This is what is meant by equality.” By the early 1960s, Malcolm was clearly frustrated with Elijah Muhammad’s policy of inaction, premised on the chiliastic dogma (the doctrine that Christ will return to Earth to reign a thousand years) that the chosen people needed only to wait Armageddon for their redemption from racial oppression. He admitted to a journalist that “the rest of us have not seen Allah: we don’t have this divine patience, and we are not going to wait on God,” and that “the younger Black Muslims want to see some action.” Added to the jealousy, ideological differences, and organizational rivalry was a sexual scandal. Malcolm confronted Elijah Muhammad in 1963 about a long-standing rumor that he had fathered a number of children with his young secretaries. Elijah Muhammad admitted his adultery but excused it as part of his divine fulfillment of Old Testament practices. Malcolm, who had read his own brother Reginald out of the Muslims for a similar sexual infraction, was emotionally shattered. In his words, “My faith had been shaken in a way that I can never fully describe.” The exposure of Elijah Muhammad’s low moral character finally broke the fundamentalist hold that he had over Malcolm.BEYOND FUNDAMENTALISM:The schism became formal in December 1963 when Elijah Muhammad suspended Malcolm for 90 days from speaking in public. The ostensible reason for the ban was Malcolm’s unauthorized comment to the press that President Kennedy’s assassination was a case of “chickens coming home to roost”- a controversial remark about endemic violence in American society. Malcolm submitted to his leader’s orders until he learned that Elijah Muhammad had secretly called for his execution. The “spiritual and psychological crisis” of Elijah Muhammad’s betrayal escalated into a question of survival. As Malcolm recalled, “The first direct death-order was how, finally, I began to arrive at my psychological divorce from the Nation of Islam.”The following March, Malcolm announced his break with the Nation of Islam and the creation of a rival organization, Muslim Mosque Inc. The narrow sectarianism of the Nation of Islam had transformed the hustler but had constrained him in an ideological strait jacket. “I was a zombie them- like all Muslims- I was hypnotized,” he remembered, “pointed in a certain direction and told to march.” After that realization, Malcolm sought to think and act anew. From an Eriksonian perspective, the schism provided the occasion to restructure his identity from a “totalism” characterized by absolutes and conformity to a “wholeness” able to tolerate tension and diversity. He spent nearly half his last year in Africa and the Middle East, seeking solutions in the Old World to problems in the New. As a result, he abandoned Elijah Muhammad’s caricature of Islam and embraced Sunni orthodoxy; he also changed his understanding of racism from a crude demonology to a sophisticated cultural analysis. Malcolm noted: “Around 1963, if anyone had noticed, I spoke less and less of religion. I taught social doctrine to Muslims, and current events, and politics.” Although he supported Elijah Muhammad’s goal of a separate black nation, he was immediately concerned that “22 million of our people who are still here in America need better food, clothing, housing, education and jobs right now.” He further modified Elijah Muhammad’s doctrines by stressing the power of the black ballot in the 1964 presidential election and by extending the olive branch to other black leaders such as Martin Luther King. However, Malcolm’s advocacy of the right of self-defense still prevented any alliance with the middle-class civil rights organizations. In addition, he placed the African-American struggle in the world-wide context of colonial liberation movements and demanded a United Nations’ investigation of the violation of black human rights in the United States.Having established a tentative political credo for Muslim Mosque Inc. Malcolm sought to anchor the new organization within the Islamic faith. In April 1964, he went on a pilgrimage to Mecca. Uncertain if he would even be accepted as a legitimate Muslim, he was overwhelmed by the gracious treatment accorded him. He wrote: “There were tens of thousands of pilgrims, from all over the world. They were of all colors, from blue-eyed blonds to black-skinned Africans. But we were all participating in the same ritual, displaying a spirit of unity and brotherhood that my experiences in America had led me to believe never could exist between the white and non-white. “The pilgrimage experience led to “a radical alteration in [his] whole outlook about ‘white men.’” The prefix El-Hajj, added to his name in honor of the hegira [Muhammad’s flight from Mecca to Medina, 622 AD], marked a “spiritual rebirth.” Shortly after his return to the US, he announced, “I’m a human being first and foremost and as such I’m for whoever and whatever benefits humanity as a whole.”Denouncing Elijah Muhammad’s demonology, Malcolm argued, “The white man is not inherently evil but America’s racist society influences him to act evilly.” He abandoned what Erikson labeled a “pseudo-species mentality,” one that ignores or denigrates the humanity of others. In Erikson’s words, “Nobody can really find his most adult identity by denying it to others.” The challenge therefore was to change the psychology of racism and the system that nourished it, not to fantasize devils.In June 1964, Malcolm founded the Organization of Afro-American Unity (OAAU), which captured his affinity for pan-Americanism. A subsequent 18-week trip to Africa and the Middle East further broadened his outlook. As he told an African summit meeting, “Our problems are your problems. It is not a Negro problem, nor an American problem. This is a world problem; a problem of humanity.” Malcolm dropped the phrase black nationalism in describing the OAAU program because of its racial exclusiveness…Much of Malcolm’s thought was provisional. As he told an audience in November 1964, “I don’t profess to have a political, economic or social solution to a problem as complicated as the one which our people face in the States, but I am one of those who is willing to try any means necessary to bring an end to the injustices our people suffer.” While skirting doctrinaire commitment, he indicated, “the American system,” including US foreign policy in the Congo and Vietnam as he linked the government’s opposition to revolutionary nationalism abroad with racial oppression at home.During the three months remaining his life after his return to the US, there was further modification of his views. In contrast to his earlier distrust of women, he linked national progress in African with the emancipation of women. He no longer supported a black state in North America or condemned racial integration and intermarriage. He endorsed black voter registration and political involvement by emphasized that civil rights legislation had not defused the “social dynamite” in the ghetto. He correctly predicted, “1965 will be the longest, hottest, bloodiest summer of the entire black revolution.”Malcolm’s remarkable evolution of though left him alienated. Black Muslims stalked him, the FBI monitored his activities, and the “Red Squad” of the NYC police infiltrated his bodyguards. “They won’t let me turn the corner,” he complained to his critics. After being unexpectedly barred from France where he was to address African students, he returned to NY only to experience a fire-bombing of his home in the early morning of February 14, 1965. Suspecting CIA involvement, he fatalistically told a reporter on February 18, “I live like a man who’s already dead.” Three days later he was shot down in a hail of gunfire from assassins in the audience as he spoke to an OAAU rally at the Audubon Hall in Harlem. A jury found three Black Muslims guilty of the murder, but speculation remains about the guilt of two of the convicted men and about the complicity of the NYC police and the FBI…In assessing Malcolm’s legacy, it is essential to come to terms with what he accomplished and what was left unfinished during the 50 weeks that remained of his life after the break with the Nation of Islam. Malcolm’s success in articulating black rage was the source of both his strength and his weakness. The militant black identity Malcolm embodied meant the end of psychic inferiority and demanded a radical readjustment of racial relations. He taught that “a person who is fighting racism is well within his rights to fight against it by any means necessary until it is eliminated”… Malcolm’s scathing indictment of racial hypocrisy and injustice made him a riveting public figure. The night of his death, his widow lamented, “He was honest- too honest for his own good.”Malcolm’s candor and charisma were, however, difficult to institutionalize. The major failure of his career was that after his schism with the Nation of Islam, his evolving conception of a new black identity and the social programs needed to facilitate its emergence were not incorporated into a viable organization. The program of the OAAU was inchoate, its administration in disarray, its membership limited, and its funds minimal. Malcolm’s extensive foreign travel and hectic personal schedule left little time for organizational duties. His militant posture barred cooperation with well-established groups such as SCLC, NAACP, and CORE (Congress of Racial Equality). Martin Luther King, Roy Wilkins [head of the NAACP], and James Farmer [head of CORE] could best use Malcolm as a foil, who, by comparison, made their civil rights programs look more palatable. Malcolm told a Harlem street rally, “They charge us with being extremists but if it was not for the extremists the white man would ignore the moderates”… His spiritual enlightenment in Mecca and abandonment of the goal of black nationalism significantly broadened his world view. “I am not a racist,” he said repeatedly after his break with Elijah Muhammad. “I do not subscribe to any of the tenets of racism.” He also stressed the inclusive identity of the black Diaspora, pan-Africanism, and ultimately human solidarity.Malcolm was most effective as a moral critic and an exemplar of a new black identity. “When we stop always saying yes to Mr. Charlie and turning the hate against ourselves,” he explained, “we will begin to be free.” He lacked the systematic program- not to mention white liberal support- that the middle-class leadership of the civil rights movement had gained. A month before his death, he acknowledged, “I would be hard pressed to give a specific definition of the overall philosophy which I think is necessary for the liberation of the black people of this country.” Nevertheless, he captured to a degree unattained by anyone else the frustration of the ghetto underclass whose degraded position remains largely unchanged since the Second Reconstruction. Two days before his death, Malcolm gave what in effect was his epitaph: “It’s a time for martyrs now. And if I’m to be one, it will be in the cause of brotherhood. That’s the only thing that can save this country.” Oates, Stephen B. "The Odyssey of Malcolm X." Portrait of America. Vol. 2. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1995. 376-88. Print.“Race Hatred Personified”: The Murder of Emmett Till by Mamie MobleyDuring World War II, more and more African Americans began to strive for equal rights. Membership in the NAACP swelled from 50,000 to 450,000, and black workers demanded equal opportunity in defense jobs. African-American soldiers returning home from the war had enjoyed equal treatment in European society and resisted going to the back of the bus again. A massive civil rights movement swept through the United States in the 1950s and 1960s. In a series of court cases, the NAACP challenged the “separate but equal” doctrine established by the Supreme Court in “Plessy v. Ferguson” (1896), which upheld segregation of public facilities. Finally, in 1954, the Supreme Court ruled in “Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas” that separate educational facilities were inherently unequal. The Court required that the nation’s schools be integrated “with all deliberate speed,” sparking heavy resistance. In the summer of 1955, young Emmett Till, a 14 year old from Chicago, visited relatives in Mississippi. After Till reportedly whistled at a white woman in a store, the woman’s relatives kidnapped and murdered him. Photographs of Till’s mutilated body graphically depicted the violence of racial hatred and catalyzed national support for civil rights. Although the men were acquitted, they later admitted committing the crime to a newspaper reporter. Mamie Mobley, Emmett’s mother, remembers that fateful summer.Emmett and I were getting ready to go on our vacation. We were excited because we were driving to Omaha were some of my cousins lived. We’d set our date which was less than a week away. But Emmett heard that Uncle Mose was in town and two of the boys that he grew up with, Uncle Mose’s grandsons. They were going back to Mississippi. That’s what he wanted to do. It messed up our plans completely. After a lot of pressure, my mother and I decided it would be all right to let Emmett go to Mississippi.About three days into Mississippi, they went into a little country store. This was Money, Mississippi. They had games on the front porch and you could buy pop and candy, little junk. The boys were playing checkers and Emmett decided to go in the store and buy something. His young cousin went into the store with him. Emmett bought bubble gum and some candy. As they came out of the sore, according to the accounts I heard from some of the boys, someone asked Emmett, “How did you like the lady in the store?” They said Emmett whistled his approval. The word got back to the two men, the husband and the half-brother of that husband – oh my goodness, Roy Bryant and Big Jim, W.J. Milam…It was about 2:30 the following Sunday morning that these two men stormed into my uncle’s house and took my son out at gunpoint. And the rest, we don’t really know what happened, but we do know how the body looked when it was finally discovered three days later. He had been shot; he had been beaten; they had wired a gin-mill fan around his neck. When the sheriff pulled Emmett from the water, the only way my uncle recognized him was by the ring on his finger.I was successful in getting the body back to Chicago and it was then, when I looked at Emmett, I could not believe that it was even something human I was looking at. I was forced to do a bit-by-bit analysis on his entire body to make really sure that that was my son. It there was any way to disclaim that body, I would have sent that body back to Mississippi. But it was without a doubt Emmett…There was a trial. The men said they questioned Emmett and they decided he was not the boy, so they pointed him back to my uncle’s house and let him go on foot. It doesn’t take much to understand. You can look through certain things and see whether or not they’re true. They were acquitted within one hour and five minutes. The jury was all-male, and all-white. Mose Wright, my mother’s brother-in-law, pointed out Bryant and Milan as the two men who came for Emmett: “Thar’s them.” It took unprecedented courage. Nothing like that had ever happened in the South before. That was an old black man, 65 years old. He stayed in the area until he was rescued by some civil-rights group and put under surveillance. One night he slept in the graveyard behind his church. He was a minister. He slept under the cotton house one night. He never spent another night in that house. No one did…That was my darkest moment, when I realized that that huge box had the remains of my son. I sent a very lovable boy on a vacation- Emmett who knew everybody in the neighborhood. They’d call for him whenever they wanted something done. “Mom, I gotta go help Mrs. Baily.” He was the block’s messenger boy. What might have been? He’s never far from my mind. I was reading in Scriptures where the Lord Jesus Christ was scarred. His visage, his face, was marred beyond that of any other man, and Emmett came to me. I said, “Oh my God, what a comparison.” The spirit spoke to me as plainly as I’m talking to you now. And the spirit said, “Emmett was race hatred personified. That is how ugly race hatred is.”“Ashamed to Be White”: Mississippi Freedom Summer (by a Northern College Student)In 1963, more than 250,000 people marched in Washington, DC to support civil rights, and the next year Congress passed a landmark civil rights act. But in the state of Mississippi, little had changed. In 1964, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) spearheaded a drive to recruit northern college students to spend their summer working for civil rights in Mississippi. As part of “Freedom Summer,” hundreds of students registered black voters, organized “freedom schools” for local children, and established community centers to provide legal and medical services. But violence marred the effort when three civil rights workers- James Chaney, a black Mississippian; Andrew Goodman, a white college student; and Michael Schwener, a white New Yorker- disappeared in June. Their bodies were found buried in an earthen dam on August 4. Here a female student volunteer, Martha, describes her own anguish and conflict at the funeral of James Chaney.Dear Blake,… Dave [Dennis, a black civil rights worker who delivered an impassioned eulogy] finally broke down and couldn’t finish, and the Chaney family was moaning, and much of the audience and I were also crying. It’s such an impossible thing to describe but suddenly again, as I’d first realized when I head the three men were missing when we were still training up at Oxford [Ohio], I felt the sacrifice the Negroes have been making for so long. How the Negro people are able to accept all the abuses of the whites- all the insults and injustices which make me ashamed to be white- and then turn around and say they wanted to love us, is beyond me.There are Negroes who want to kill whites, and many Negroes have much bitterness, but still the majority seems to have the quality of being able to look for a future in which whites will love the Negroes. Our kids [in the freedom school] talk very critically of all the whites around here and still they have a dream of freedom in which both races understand and accept each other. There is such an overpowering task ahead of these kids that sometimes I can’t do anything but cry for them. I hope they are up to the task: I’m not sure I would be if I were a Mississippi Negro.As a white northerner, I can get involved whenever I feel like it and run home whenever I get bored or frustrated or scared. I hate the attitude and position of the northern whites and despise myself when I think that way. Lately, I’ve been feeling homesick and longing for pleasant old Westport and sailing and swimming and my friends. I don’t quite know what to do because I can’t ignore my desire to go home, and yet I feel I am a much weaker person than I like to think I am because I do have these emotions. I’ve always tried to avoid situations which aren’t so nice, like arguments and dirty houses and now maybe Mississippi.I asked my father if I could stay down here for a whole year, and I was almost glad when he said, “No,” that we couldn’t afford it because it would mean supporting me this year in addition to three more years of college. I have a desire to go home and read a lot and go to Quaker meetings and be by myself so I can think about all this rather than being in the middle of it all the time. But I know if my emotions run like they have in the past, that I can only take that pacific sort of life for a little while and then I get the desire to be active again and get involved with knowing other people…I am angry because I have a choice as to whether or not to work in the Movement, and I am playing upon that choice and leaving here. I wish I could talk with you ‘cause I’d like to know if you ever felt this way about anything. I mean, have you ever despised yourself for your weak conviction or something? And what is making it worse is that all those damn northerners are thinking of me as a brave hero… “What was the Point of Being Scared?”: From Sharecropper to Civil Rights Worker (by Fannie Lou Hamer)One of the chief projects of Freedom Summer was the organization of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP), which challenged the all-white Mississippi Democratic Party. In August 1964, the MFDP demanded that its delegates to the Democratic presidential convention in Atlantic City, NJ be seated instead of those from the all-white party. Fannie Lou Hamer was one of the MFDP delegates. On national television, she challenged the nation: “If the Freedom Democratic Party is not seated now, I question America… Is this America, the land of the free and the home of the brave, where… our lives be threatened daily because we want to live as decent human beings…? Hamer refused to accept a compromise that seated two of the 68 MFDP delegates. Here, she describes her transformation from sharecropper to civil rights workers.I was born October 6, 1917, in Montgomery, Mississippi. My parents moved to Sunflower County when I was two years old, to… Mr. E. W. Brandon’s plantation. I’ve been here now almost 47 years in Sunflower County. My parents were sharecroppers, and they had a big family. Twenty children. Fourteen boys and six girls. I’m the twentieth child. All of us worked in the fields, of course, but we never did get anything out of sharecropping. We’d make fifty and sixty bales [of cotton] and end up with nothing…… I married in 1944 and stayed on the plantation until 1962 when I went down to the courthouse in Indianola to register to vote. That happened because I went to a mass meeting one night. Until then I’d never heard of no mass meeting, and I didn’t know that a Negro could register and vote. Bob Moses, Reggie Robinson, Jim Bevel, and James Forman were some of the SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee) workers who ran that meeting. When they asked for those to raise their hands who’d go down to the courthouse the next day, I raised mine. Had it high as I could get it. I guess if I’d had any sense I’d a-been a little scared, but what was the point of being scared? The only thing they could do to me was kill me and it seemed like they’d been trying to do that a little bit at a time ever since I could remember…Well, there was eighteen of us who went down to the courthouse that day and all of us were arrested. Police said the bus was painted the wrong color- said it was too yellow. After I got bailed out, I went back to the plantation where Pap [her husband] and I lived for eighteen years. My oldest girl met me and told me that Mr. Marlow, the plantation owner, was made and raising sand. He had heard that I had tried to register. That night he called on us and said, “We’re not going to have this in Mississippi and you will have to withdraw. I am looking for your answer, yea or nay?” I just looked. He said, “I will give you until tomorrow morning. And if you don’t withdraw you will have to leave. If you do go withdraw, it’s only how I feel, you might still have to leave.” So I left that same night. Pap had to stay on till work on the plantation was through. Ten days later they fired into Mrs. Tucker’s house where I was staying. They also shot two girls at Mr. Sissel’s…I reckon the most horrible experience I’ve had was in June of 1963. I was arrested along with several others in Winona, Mississippi. That’s in Montgomery County, the county where I was born… The state highway patrolmen came and carried me out of the cell into another cell where there were two Negro prisoners. The patrolman gave the first Negro a long blackjack that was heavy. It was loaded with something, and they had me to lay down on the bunk with my face down, and I was beat. I was beat by the first Negro till he gave out. Then the patrolman ordered the other man to take the blackjack and he began to beat. That’s when I started screaming and working my feet ‘cause I couldn’t help it. The patrolman told the first Negro that had beat me to sit on my feet. I had to hug around the mattress to keep the sound from coming out. Finally they carried me back to my cell…What I really feel is necessary is that the black people in this country will have to upset this applecart. We can no longer ignore the fact that America is NOT the “land of the free and the home of the brave.” I used to question this for years- what did our kids actually fight for? They would go in the service and go through all of that and come right out to be drowned in the river in Mississippi… I’ve worked on voter registration here ever since I went to that first mass meeting. In 1964 we registered 63,000 black people from Mississippi into the Freedom Democratic Party. We formed our own party because the whites wouldn’t even let us register. We decided to challenge the white Mississippi Democratic Party at the National Convention. We followed all the laws that the white people themselves made. We tried to attend the precinct meetings and they locked the doors on us or moved the meetings, and that’s against the laws they made for their ownselvesSo we were the ones that held the real precinct meetings. At all these meetings across the state we elected our representatives to go to the national Democratic convention in Atlantic City. But we learned the hard way that even though we had all the law and all the righteousness on our side- that the white man is not going to give up his power to us… The question for black people is not when is the white man going to give us our rights, or when is he going to give us good education for our children, or when is he going to give us jobs. If the white man gives you anything, just remember when he gets ready he will take it right back. We have to take for ourselves… “It was Worth It”: Celebrating the Right to Vote (Unita Blackwell)The Voting Rights Act of 1965 helped eliminate many of the barriers to the ballot box for African Americans. By the 1980s, Mississippi had more black elected officials than any other state. Unita Blackwell, one of the MFDP delegates in 1964, addressed the Democratic National Convention in 1984, this time as mayor of Mayersville, Mississippi. For her, it invoked the memory of Fannie Lou Hamer.I tried not to get too emotional about it, but there was a feeling that it was worth all of it that we had been through. I remember a woman told me one time when I was running do justice of the peace, “The reason I won’t vote for you is because they going to kill you.” The white had told her that they were going to kill me, and she thought she was saving my life. And when I stood in that podium twenty years later, I was standing there for this woman, to understand that she had a right to register to vote for whomever she wanted to, and that we as a people were going to live.Jesse Jackson spoke before me, prime time, of course. People did see me late at night, and some of those that know me know that I felt tears because Fannie Lou Hamer should have been standing there. She was standing there in us- in me, in Jesse, in all of us- because in 1964 she testified. Chaney, Schwerner, Goodman died in my state, Mississippi, for the fright for me to stand there at that podium. That’s what I felt, that I was standing there for all who had died, for all the generations to come. “We Were Just Ordinary People”: A Child Marches in Selma (Sheyann Webb)In 1965, civil rights workers conducted a major campaign for voting rights in Selma, Alabama. Through literacy tests, limited hours for registration, and police pressure, Selma discouraged its black citizens from voting. Only about 1% of the African Americans of voting age in Selma were registered. A 59-mile protest march from Selma to the state capital of Montgomery was organized in March 1965. On the first try, March 7, the demonstrators were forcibly turned back by Alabama state troopers at the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma. A second try on March 9 was stopped pending a court hearing. On March 15, President Lyndon Johnson submitted his Voting Rights Act to Congress, boosting the marchers’ cause. Finally, on March 21, the protestors left Selma; they arrived in Montgomery four days later, 25,000 strong. One of the marchers as 9-year-old Sheyann Webb. Here she describes the confrontation at the Edmund Pettus Bridge. Now the Edmund Pettus Bridge sits above the downtown; you have to walk up it like it’s a little hill. We couldn’t see the other side; we couldn’t see the troopers. So we started up and the first part of the line was over. I couldn’t see all that much because I was so little; the people in front blocked my view. But when we got up there on that high part and looked down, we saw them. I remember a woman saying something like, “Oh, my Lord” or something. And I stepped out to the side for a second and I saw them. They were in a line- they looked like a blue picket fence- stretched across the highway. There were others gathered behind that first line and to the sides… And further back were some of Sheriff Jim Clark’s posse-men on their horses. Traffic had been blocked.At that point I began to get a little uneasy about things. I thing everyone did. People quit talking; it was so quiet then that all you could hear was the wind blowing and our footsteps on the concrete sidewalk. Well, we kept moving down the bridge. I remember glancing at the water in the Alabama River, and it was yellow and looked cold. I was told later that Hosea Williams said to John Lewis (two leaders of the march), “See that water down there? I hope you can swim, ‘cause we’re fixin’ to end up in it.”The troopers could be seen more clearly now. I guess I was 50 to 75 yards from them. They were wearing blue helmets, blue jackets, and they carried clubs in their hands; they had those gas-mask pouches slung across their shoulders. The first part of the march line reached them and we all came to a stop. For a few seconds we just kept standing, and then I heard this voice speaking over the bullhorn saying that this was an unlawful assembly and for us to disperse and go back to the church.I remember I held the woman’s hand who was next to me and had it gripped hard. I wasn’t really scared at that point. Then I stepped out a ways and looked again and saw the troopers putting on their masks. THAT scared me. I had never faced the troopers before, and nobody have ever put on gas masks during the downtown marches. But this one was different; we were out of the city limits and on a highway. Williams said something to the troopers asking if we could stay… and then I heard the voice again come over the bullhorn and tell us we had two minutes to disperse…… So the next thing I know- it didn’t seem like two minutes had gone by- the voice was saying, “Troopers advance and see that they are dispersed.” Just all of a sudden it was beginning to happen. I couldn’t see for sure how it began, but just before it did I took another look and saw the line of the troopers moving toward us; the wind was whipping at their pants legs…All I knew is I heard all this screaming and the people were turning and I saw this first part of the line running and stumbling back toward us. At that point. I was just off the bridge and on the side of the highway. And they came running and some of them were crying out and somebody yelled, “Oh, God, they’re killing us!” I think I just froze then… I remember looking toward the troopers and they were backing up, but some of them were standing over some of our people who had been knocked down or had fallen. It seemed like just a few seconds went by and I heard a shout. “Gas! Gas!” And everybody started screaming again. And I looked and I saw the troopers charging us again and some of them were swinging their arms and throwing canisters of tear gas. And beyond them I saw the horsemen starting their charge toward us… I’ll tell you, I forgot about praying, and I just turned and ran. And just as I was turning, the tear gas got me; it burned my nose first, then got my eyes. I was scared that I might fall over the railing and into the water. I don’t know if I was screaming or not, but everyone else was. People were running and falling and ducking and you could hear people scream and hear the whips swishing and you’d hear them striking the people… It seemed to take forever to get across the bridge. It seemed I was running uphill for an awfully long time… I just knew then that I was going to die, that those horses were going to trample me…All of a sudden somebody was grabbing me under the arms and lifting me up and running. The horses went by and I kept waiting to get trampled on or hit, but they went on by and I guess they were hitting at somebody else. And I looked up and saw it was Hosea Williams who had me and he was running but we didn’t seem to be moving, and I shouted at him, “Put me down! You can’t run fast enough with me!” But he held on until we were off the bridge and down on Broad Street and he let me go. I didn’t stop running until I got home…I could never understand the hatred some of the whites showed toward us. I was just a kid and they’d yell at me. Yet, we all prayed to the same God. I couldn’t understand the hatred. I couldn’t understand the segregation. What happened here in 1965 is history now. I know that. We have to go on. But I can never forget it. I never will… I’m just so happy that I could be a part of a thing that touched our souls. I am so proud of the people who did something in 1965 that was truly amazing. We were just people, ordinary people, and we did it.“Poor White Trash Like Me”: Bringing Black and White Together (by Peggy Terry)Urban blacks in the North had been relatively unaffected by the move to end legal segregation in the South. Their problems of de facto segregation, poverty, and neglect were not remedied by civil rights laws. In the 1960s, a wave of riots sparked by black protestors swept northern cities. The Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. believed that fighting poverty was the next step in the civil rights movement. He criticized President Johnson for spending too much money on the Vietnam War and not enough on domestic problems. In late 1967, King began to organize a multiracial “Poor People’s Campaign” to march on Washington. He was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee, in 1968 while still planning the campaign. Peggy Terry, a poor white woman who once hated black people, joined in King’s movement. I knew black people were around, but I didn’t know where they lived, in Oklahoma City. In Paducah [Kentucky], we lived on the edge. We could sit on the porch and hear the singing from the black church. That’s where I really learned to love gospel singing. I never made friends with any of them because I was brought up in prejudice. How can you be raised in garbage and not stink from it? You pick it up. It’s like the air you breathe. There wasn’t anyone saying any different. Until I heard Reverend King, I never heard any black person say, “I’m as good as you are.” Out in the open.I picked it up from everyone in the family. My father never changed. In one of our trips from Kentucky to Oklahoma in 1929, we went there in a Model T Ford. Daddy slid the car off into a ditch. We were just laying sidewise. This old black man came by on a wagon and offered to pull Daddy out. Daddy says, “N****r, you better get your black ass on down the road. I don’t need any help from you!” Here was my mother, pregnant- she had the baby two weeks after we got there- and three other little children in the car. I was eight. I remember it was so cold. Here’s this bigoted man, cutting off his nose to spite his face. That’s what a lot of white people do…Funny thing, my father was a strong union man and always fought the bosses. He always spoke out and stuck up for the working man. Walked off many jobs without a penny in his pocket. But he had this blind spot when it came to color… You don’t go anywhere because you always see yourself as something you’re not. As long as you can say, “I’m better than they are,” then there’s somebody below you can kick. But once you get over that, you see that you’re not any better off than they are. In fact, you’re worse off because you’re living a lie. And it was right there, in front of us. In the cotton field, chopping cotton, and right over in the next field, there’s these black people- Alabama, Texas, Kentucky. Never once did it occur to me that we had anything in common…I was living in Montgomery, Alabama, during the bus boycott and that absolutely changed my life. It forced white people to take a look at the situation. Not all of them changed the way I did. It didn’t leave you in the same comfortable spot you were in. you had to be either for it or against it… I saw Reverend King beat up at the jail. He would be released on bond and they would pick him up again on some trifling things. They just kept repeatedly doing these things. I remember one time he came out of the jail in all-white clothes. About five or six white men jumped him… When I saw them beating up on Reverene King, something clicked. When I heard he was gonna get out of jail, me and some other white women wanted to see this smart-aleck n****r. I’m so thankful I went down there that day because I might have gone all my life just the way I was. When I saw all those people beating up on him and he didn’t fight back, and didn’t cuss like I would have done, and he didn’t say anything, I was just turned upside down… With all my feelings and what had happened in Montgomery, I was ready to take a step forward and try to undo all the damage. When I believe in something, I act on it. I went down and joined CORE… I enjoy picketing, too. I don’t remember who we were picketing, but this really well-dressed white woman said, “Why are you out and doing this,” I had about six kids with me, mine and my girlfriend’s. I said, “Well, where else could I go and be treated with this respect that I’ve been treated with by Reverend King, the Nobel Peace Prize winner? No white Nobel Prize winner would pay poor white trash like me the slightest attention. Reverend King does.” “You Can’t come Here”: Busing in Boston (by Ruth Batson)In 1969, the Supreme Court ruled that “all deliberate speed” had not been fast enough: the nation’s schools must be desegregated without delay. In Boston and other northern cities, segregation of public schools resulted from residential patterns, rather than legal prohibitions. But black schools were often inferior to white schools. Some federal courts mandated busing students outside their neighborhoods to achieve racial balance in the schools, and the Supreme Court upheld the practice in 1971. In Boston, court-ordered busing met with intense resistance and even violence. Ruth Batson, an African American community leader, fought for the integration of Boston’s schools.When we would go to white schools, we’d see these lovely classrooms. The teachers were permanent. We’d see wonderful materials. When we’d go to our schools, we would see overcrowded classrooms, children sitting out in the corridors, and so forth. And so then we decided that where there were a large number of white students, that’s where the care went. That’s where the books went. That’s where the money went. We formed a negotiating team. I was chair of the team… we decided that we would bring these complaints to the Boston School Committee. This was in 1963… We were na?ve. And when we got to the school committee room I was surprised to see all of the press around. We thought this was just an ordinary school committee meeting, and we made our presentation and everything broke loose. We were insulted. We were told our kids were stupid and this was why they didn’t learn. We were completely rejected that night. We were there until all hours of the evening. And we left battle-scarred, because we found out that this was an issue that was going to give their political careers stability for a long time to come… After that meeting we were asked to come to a private meeting with the members of the Boston School Committee. No press. Just us and them. And so we would sit down and we would talk. At one point Louise Day Hicks, the chairperson of the school committee, said, “The word that I’m objecting to is ‘segregation.’ As long as you talk about segregation I won’t discuss this…” Mrs. Hicks’ favorite statement was, “Do you think that sitting a white child beside a black child, by osmosis the black child will get better?” that was her favorite statement.And then there were black people and a lot of our friends who said, “Ruth, why don’t we get them to fix up the schools and make them better in our district?” And, of course, that repelled us because we came through the separate but equal theory. This was not something we believed in. even now, when I talk to a lot of people, they say we were wrong in pushing for desegregation. But there was a very practical reason to do it in those days. We knew there was more money being spent in certain schools, white schools- not all of them, but in certain white schools- than there was being spent in black schools. So therefore, our theory was move our kids into those schools where they’re putting all of the resources so that they can get a better education…It was a horrible time to live in Boston. All kinds of hate mail. Horrible stuff. I also got calls from black people in Boston. They would call up and they’d say, “Mrs. Batson, I know you think you’re doing a good thing. And maybe where you came from there was segregation, but we don’t have segregation in Boston.” And I would say to them, “Well, where do I come from?” And invariably they would say South Carolina or North Carolina. Of course, now, I was born in Boston. So there were people who could not accept the fact that this horrible thing was happening in Boston, the city of culture. When Judge Garrity’s decision came down in June of 1974, we were sunk when we heard some of the remedies, the one of busing to South Boston and Charlestown particularly, because those of us who had lived in Boston all of our lives knew that this was going to be a very, very difficult thing to pull off. As a child I had encountered the wrath of people in South Boston. And I just felt that they were bigoted. I just felt that they made it very clear that they didn’t like black people. And I was prepared for them not to want black students coming to the school… I never heard any public official on the state level or the city level come and say, “This is a good thing. We should all learn together. We should all live together.” There was no encouragement from anybody. I call it complete official neglect… One of the things that I was concerned about was the fact that just because you were black, you were told that you couldn’t go there. “This was my school. This is our place. You can’t come here.” I thought that a great educational achievement had been made to show both white and black kids that they could go anywhere they wanted to. That there should be no school in the city of Boston that would not admit a child because of their color… When you saw what the kids had to go through- I was just as proud of some of the white kids that stuck through it, because there were white families who made their kids go and stay in that school. Kids had to go through metal detectors, and police were all over the place, and there was such ridicule in the halls. I thought that the kids who went through this were just wonderful kids. And most of them weren’t kids with great marks or anything. They were just kids who were determined. There was a movement, And they felt part of a movement…UNIT 9Name: ______________________________________________________ Date: _________________ Pd: _______QUESTIONS- Civil Rights ReadingsIn the case of Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, the Supreme Court ruled that:Segregated facilities must be equalRacially segregated schools are inherently unequal and unconstitutionalAfrican Americans and white must have equal access to public transportationVoting rights must apply equally to whites and African AmericansThe Montgomery bus boycott and Greensboro lunch counter sit-ins are examples of:Enforcement by the Justice Department of the Brown decisionPresident Eisenhower’s use of federal troops to end segregationFailures of nonviolent direct action by the NAACPProtests against segregation coming from the African American community The Black Muslims and the Black Power movements advocated:Voting rights and nonviolent protestSeparatism and self-rule for African AmericansEqual opportunity and social integrationMulticultural education for whites and blacks“The chief impetus for the civil rights movement came from African Americans, not from elected officials.” Analyze the validity of that statement by analyzing the following:Brown v. Board of Education of TopekaMontgomery Bus BoycottLittle Rock Nine CrisisSit-InsCivil Rights Acts of 1957 and 1960What are the continuing consequences resulting from schools being segregated in the past? ................
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