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First Southern Sit-in, Greensboro NC (Feb)
Sit-ins Spread Across the South (1960-1964)
Charlotte & Rock Hill Sit-ins (Feb-Mar)
Nashville Student Movement (1960-1964)
Mass Arrest of Student Protesters, Orangeburg, SC. (Feb-March)
Atlanta Sit-ins (Mar-Oct)
Baton Rouge Sit-ins & Student Strike (Mar-April)
New Orleans Merchant Boycotts & Sit-ins (1960-1963)
Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) Founded (April)
Civil Rights Act of 1960 (May)
King, JFK, and the 1960 Election (Oct-Nov)
New Orleans School Desegregation (Nov)
[1960 was the year of the lunch-counter sit-ins. For those who
are not familiar with them, lunch-counters were the fast-food
providers of the day (companies like Macdonalds & Burger King were
just getting started). Most large stores had lunch counters where a
cup of coffee cost a dime, and you could get a cheese-burger, fries,
and a coke for 60 cents. They provided quick cheap meals for students,
shoppers, and workers on lunch break the same way that shopping-mall
food-courts do today.]
[In most southern communities in 1960, segregation was mandated
by law (see examples). These laws
applied to both patrons and owners. Blacks who tried to use
"white-only" facilities could be arrested for violating a segregation
ordinance as happened to Rosa Parks
and others in Montgomery. And in theory, the owners and managers of
public facilities could be arrested if they serve Blacks (though that
happened rarely, if ever). But after Federal courts began declaring
school and bus segregation laws unconstitutional, most southern
prosecutors were careful to charge Blacks who defied segregation with
general crimes such as "Disturbing the Peace" rather than violation of
the race-specific segregation laws. In this way they prevented the
courts from overturning the segregation ordinances on appeal, and
allowed store owners to continue claiming that they had
to deny service to Blacks because "it's the law." This
cynical ploy was used to maintain segregation until the
Civil Rights Act of 1964
eliminated all segregation laws.]
Bennett College for Women and North Carolina Agricultural and Technical (NC A&T;) are two Black colleges in Greensboro NC. In the Fall of 1959, the Bennett College NAACP chapter discusses strategies and tactics for opposing segregation. The young women seek information from the Oklahoma City NAACP who had previously used non-violent direct action to desegregate local restaurants. They decide to target the Woolworth's lunch counter in downtown Greensboro because it is part of a national chain which Blacks all over the country patronize. The President of Bennett advises them to hold off until after the long Christmas break, so that their campaign does not begin, and then lose momentum when the students return home for the holidays.
On February 1, 1960, four Black men from NC A&T; — Ezell Blair Jr, Franklin McCain, Joseph McNeil, and David Richmond — sit down at Woolworth's "whites only" lunch counter and ask to be served coffee and doughnuts. They are refused. Though they are prepared to be arrested that does not occur. They stay until the store closes. The next day they return, now joined by Billy Smith, Clarence Henderson, and others. They sit from 11am to 3pm but again are not served. While they wait, they study and do their school work. The local newspaper and TV station cover this second sit-in, and suddenly everyone is aware of it. At first the media call it a "Sit Down," but soon everyone is using the term "Sit-In."
The students form the Student Executive Committee for Justice to sustain and expand the campaign. The Greensboro NAACP endorses their action. On February 3rd, more than 60 students, now including women from Bennett and students from Dudley High School, occupy every seat at the Woolworth's counter in rotating shifts for the entire day. The Ku Klux Klan also learns of the sit-in, and led by North Carolina's official State Chaplain George Dorsett they heckle and harass the students. The students are not deterred, and in the following days their number grows — including white students from Womens College (now University of North Carolina) — and the sit-ins spread to Kress and Walgreens lunch counters, and then to other Greensboro restaurants.
The sit-ins, picket lines, and boycotts continue off and on as negotiations get under way, the lunch counters are closed and reopened, and public opinion weighs in. Woolworth and Kress stores in the North and West are boycotted and picketed in support of the sit-in movements that are now spreading across the upper and mid South. When the college students leave for the summer, Dudley High students carry on the movement. Finally, in July, the national drugstore chains agree to serve all "properly dressed and well behaved people," regardless of race.
For more information:
Books: Greensboro, NC Sit-in & Movement
Web: Greensboro Sit-ins
The Greensboro sit-in on February 1st is the spark that ignites a raging prairie fire, a fire for justice that the forces of the old order cannot quench. First by word-of-mouth, and then via media coverage, the word flashes across the South. In the following week, students in other North Carolina towns such as Charlotte, Winston-Salem, Durham, Raleigh, Fayetteville, and others pick up the torch and begin their own sit-ins at local lunch counters and restaurants.
On February 10, sit-ins spread to Hampton VA, on February 12 to Rock Hill SC, and on February 13, Black students in Nashville TN began a desegregation campaign that lasts for years. By the end of February there have been sit-ins in more than thirty communities in seven states. By the end of April, sit-ins have reached every southern state. By year's end, more than 70,000 men and women — mostly Black, a few white — have participated in a sit-in. And more than 3,000 have been arrested.
Most of the sit-ins are preceded by careful planning and training in the tactics of Non-Violent Resistance, and are characterized by strict discipline on the part of the protesters that minimizes physical assaults and provides a clear, powerful message. Some sit-ins, however, are spontaneous and lack of training in non-violent tactics sometimes results in demonstrators retaliating when attacked by racists. That gives the cops an opportunity to arrests the sit-ins (not the racist attackers) on violence-related charges (with higher bail and stiffer sentences), and for a hostile local media to discredit the protests.
There had been earlier sit-ins in Oklahoma, Baltimore, and cities in the North, and there had been previous student protests against segregation in the South — such as those in Orangeburg in 1956 — but after the first sit-in on February 1, it is as if a dam has broken, and the waters that had steadily been building up are suddenly unleashed. Sometimes the action takes place near college campuses where people have been talking and quietly organizing; sometimes it takes place where almost nothing had been happening previously. And everywhere, new people became involved who had not been to meetings and who had never thought of themselves as activists before they participate in their first sit-in.
Several factors may explain why the Greensboro sit-in ignited a freedom firestorm across the South when earlier student protests had remained local:
Yet for all that it is widespread, the sit-in movement is mostly limited to the upper and mid-south. Except for Rock Hill and Orangeburg SC, Atlanta GA, and New Orleans & Baton Rouge LA, each of which have significant sit-in movements in 1960, attempts in the Deep South states of South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana to build sit-in movements are ruthlessly quashed by arrests and violence.
As Movement veterans, there are two points that we believe are of particular importance regarding the wave of sit-ins that flashed across the south:
The sit-ins both challenge the existing organizations and reinvigorate and re-energize them. By the end of 1960 all them (and of course the newly formed SNCC) are experiencing a new birth of activity, new members are joining, new branches, chapters, and affiliates are forming, and new, more militant leadership is emerging.
For more information:
Books: Sit-In Movement
Web: Sit-ins
Inspired by Greensboro, sit-ins by Smith University students begin in Charlotte NC on February 9. Led by J. Charles Jones, 200 students occupy all downtown lunch counters. On the 12th, students from Friendship Junior College sit down at Woolworth's and McCrory's in nearby Rock Hill, SC.
To oppose any form of integration, 350 businessmen form a White Citizens Council in Rock Hill. South Carolina Governor (later U.S. Senator) Ernest Hollings supports them with the assertion that the sit-ins "..are purely to create violence and not to promote anyone's rights." But the students make it clear, "We're not seeking intermarriage. We don't feel that sitting next to a white person will help us digest our food any better. We just want to be able to sit down and have a cup of coffee like other customers."
By July, most of the Charlotte lunch counters and restaurants accept integration and agree to serve Blacks. But Rock Hill continues to resist any form of racial equality. The sit-ins continue and many are arrested — 70 in one day, on March 15. Protests continue through the year, and in February of 1961, the students move to a Jail-No-Bail strategy.
For more information:
Web:
Rock Hill & Charlotte Sit-ins (J. Charles Jones)
Dynamics of Protest Diffusion: 1960 Sit-In Movement (Andrews & Biggs — Oxford Univ, UK) [PDF]
The Nashville Christian Leadership Conference (NCLC), an affiliate of SCLC, is founded in 1958. Led by Rev. Kelly Smith and divinity student C.T. Vivian, it organizes a workshop on Non-Violent Resistance by James Lawson who had studied non-violence with Gandhi's disciples in India.
In the Fall of 1959, Lawson, now a Vanderbilt University divinity student, begins regular anti-segregation strategy meetings and non-violent training sessions for students attending Nashville's Black colleges: American Baptist Theological Seminary, Fisk University, Meharry Medical College, and Tennessee Agricultural & Industrial (now Tennessee State Univ).
Prominent among those attending Lawson's sessions are students who will soon assume major leadership roles in the awakening Freedom Movement: Marion Barry, James Bevel, Bernard Lafayette, John Lewis, Diane Nash, and C.T. Vivian.
On February 13, less than two weeks after the Greensboro sit-in, more than 100 students commence the Nashville Student Movement — the largest, best organized, most disciplined, and most persistent of the student sit-in groups in the South. They occupy the Kress, McClellan, and Woolworth's lunch counters. Hundreds more students join as the sit-ins continue on following days — lunch counters at Grants and Walgreens, Greyhound and Trailways, and local department stores are added. White racists heckle, harass, and attack the students who meet — and defeat — violence with the tactics of Non-Violent Resistance.
Nashville's Black community stands solidly behind the students, organizing a crippling boycott of downtown merchants. The city tries to intimidate the students and break the boycott with mass arrests that fill the jails to overflowing. The city fails, the students and the community united together hang tough.
When 81 of the students are convicted of "Disorderly Conduct" they refuse to pay the fine, choosing to serve their time in jail instead. Sit-in leader Diane Nash explains, "We feel that if we pay these fines we would be contributing to, and supporting, the injustice and immoral practices that have been performed in the arrest and conviction of the defendants."
Lawson is expelled from Vanderbilt and other student leaders are threatened with reprisals. The sit-ins continue. The Mayor offers a "compromise" — divide the lunch counters into separate Black and white sections. NCLC and the students reject his proposal — separate is not equal.
On April 19 the home of Black attorney Alexander Looby, who has been defending the students in court, is destroyed by a terrorist bomb. Thousands of demonstrators — students and adults, including some whites — march through Nashville to the steps of City Hall. Diane Nash confronts Mayor Ben West, forcing him to admit that segregation is wrong and that the lunch counters should be desegregated. Nashville becomes the first Southern city to at least start desegregating its public facilities, though demonstrations continue in Nashville until passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 finally makes segregation illegal.
For more information:
Books:
The Children
Walking With the Wind
Web: Nashville Student Movement
After several days training in the tactics of Non-Violent Resistance using the "CORE Rule For Action," on February 25th some 40 students from South Carolina State and Claflin College attempt to sit-in at the Kress store in downtown Orangeburg. The lunch counter is closed and the stools removed to prevent Blacks from sitting at a "white-only" facility. For three weeks the students sit-in and picket.
On March 15 — a cold winter day — Claflin Student Council President (and later CORE field secretary) Tom Gaither and State College freshman (and later SNCC Chairman) Charles "Chuck" McDew, lead almost 1,000 students on a peaceful march downtown to protest segregation and support the sit-ins. The cops attack them with clubs and tear-gas and the fire department knocks them off their feet with freezing water from high-pressure hoses. Almost 400 of the marchers are forced into a police stockade in the largest Freedom Movement mass arrest up to that time. Convicted of "Breach of the Peace," the U.S. Supreme Court overturns the convictions two years later because their side-walk march was a peaceful, orderly petition to regress grievances within the protection of the 1st Amendment.
For more information:
Book: Freedom & Justice: Four Decades of the Civil Rights Struggle..
In 1960, Atlanta University, the Interdenominational Theologic Center, and Clark, Morehouse, Morris Brown, and Spelman Colleges have adjacent campuses. Together, these Black institutions are known as the Atlanta University Center (AUC). [In 1988 Atlanta and Clark merged to form Clark Atlanta University.]
After reading about the Greensboro sit-ins, AUC students Lonnie King, Julian Bond, Herschelle Sullivan, Carolyn Long, Joseph Pierce, and others form the Committee on Appeal for Human Rights (COAHR). They organize workshops and training sessions on the strategy and tactics of Non-Violent Resistance and begin recruiting students willing to take an oath of non-violence and sit-in at local lunch counters.
On March 9, COAHR students publish "An Appeal for Human Rights," in Atlanta newspapers. A declaration of war against racism and discrimination, the Appeal condemns in specific detail the injustices of segregation, demands that it be ended, and unequivocally states, "We [AUC students] have joined our hearts, minds, and bodies in the cause of gaining those rights which are inherently ours as members of the human race and citizens of these United States. ... We do not intend to wait placidly for those rights which are already legally ours to be meted out to us one at a time. Today's youth will not sit by submissively, while being denied all the rights, privileges, and joys of life. ... We must say in all candor that we plan to use every legal and non-violent means at our disposal to secure full citizenship rights as members of this great Democracy of ours."
The Appeal is also a challenge to the "old guard" leaders of Atlanta's Black community and their slow strategies of negotiation and litigation. Against the advice of their more cautious elders, 200 AUC students launch sit-ins on March 15, targeting facilities at government buildings (city, state, and federal), and interstate bus and train terminals since — in theory — public access to these are guaranteed by the 14th Amendment.
Seventy-seven students are arrested as are the six students who had signed the March 9 "Appeal for Human Rights." The 83 are charged with "Breach of the Peace," "Refusing to Leave Premises," "Intimidating" the restaurant owners, and "Conspiracy," a serious felony. If convicted, they face 99 years in the penitentiary. Negotiations with the white power structure slowly get under way while direct action continues and an ultimately successful legal defense of the arrested students is mounted. The negotiations with the Atlanta power structure are long and ultimately fruitless — they will not agree to end segregation.
Over the weekend of October 14-16, SNCC holds a strategy conference at AUC of student activists from across the South, and many Atlanta students attend. The COAHR had worked over the summer to make plans for the fall when students return. On October 19, COAHR mounts large demonstrations and sit-ins, this time targeted at eight of Atlanta's segregated downtown stores. In addition, hundreds of AUC students picket an Atlanta police station to protest previous arrests and general mistreatment of Blacks by the cops. A small number of whites from Emory and Georgia Tech also protest segregation. In all, 52 protesters are arrested and charged with "Trespass" and "Refusing to Leave Private Facilities." Fourteen of those arrested refuse to post bond as part of a "Jail-No-Bail" strategy to intensify the struggle.
As the flagship store of the downtown business district, Rich's department store is a primary target. The students ask Dr. King to join them on a sit-in at a restaurant on a passageway called the "Bridge" on the 2nd floor of Rich's. Dr. King, Lonnie King, and several other students are arrested. At the same time, students are sitting-in at the Magnolia Tea Room, the fancy restaurant on Rich's 6th floor. Though reluctant to be arrested due to legal troubles from his Movement activities in Alabama, he participates and is hauled off to jail with the students. In solidarity with those following the "Jail-No-Bail" strategy he refuses to post bond and remains imprisoned.
The arrests galvanize Atlanta's Black community and some "old guard" Black leaders join the ongoing protests. Blacks boycott the segregated stores. Negotiations are resumed. Six days later, on October 24, Atlanta Mayor Hartsfield orders the release of all demonstrators still in jail. All except Dr. King are freed (see King, JFK, and the 1960 Election for what occured in regards to King).
Protests and boycotts continue. By September of 1961, many store owners have desegregated their lunch counters. In 1962, a federal court rules in favor of a COAHR lawsuit and orders the desegregation of the city's public pools and parks. But overall, in spite of power structure propaganda touting Atlanta as the "City too busy to hate," Atlanta lags behind many other southern cities. Student leaders tell the new Mayor in 1963 that, "Three years have passed without our having realized the goals which we set down." The struggle continues until the Civil Rights Act of 1964 makes segregated public facilities illegal. Even after that, it takes years to break down the barriers of custom, bigotry, and social pressure.
For more information:
Web:
Atlanta in the Civil Rights Movement (Atlanta Higher Education)
Atlanta University District (National Park Service)
As sit-ins spread across the upper and mid-south, the all-white Louisiana State Board of Education threatens "Stern disciplinary action" against any student who participates in a sit-in. The President of Southern University (SU) — a segregated, state-run Black college in Baton Rouge — tells students they will be expelled if they sit-in.
On March 28, seven SU students are arrested cops for sitting-in at a Kress lunch counter. Charged with "Disturbing the Peace," their bail is set at $1,500 — the equivalent of $10,000 in 2006 dollars — an astronomically high bond for a misdemeanor charge. The next day, nine more students are arrested for sitting-in at the Greyhound bus terminal. The following day, led by SU student and CORE supporter Major Johns, 3,500 students march to the state capitol building to protest segregation, the arrests, and the outrageous bail amounts.
Along with Major Johns, the 16 students who had been arrested are expelled from SU and barred from all public colleges and universities in the state of Louisiana. In response, SU students call for a student strike — a boycott of classes until the 17 are reinstated. Said the expelled President of Senior Class Marvin Robinson who had been arrested on the first Kress sit-in, "What is more important, human dignity or the university? We felt it was human dignity."
The SU administration tries to break the boycott by appealing to the students' school spirit and calling parents with accusations that the student leaders are inciting a riot. The parents, fearing for the safety of their children, begin pulling their sons and daughters out of the university. The boycott evolves into a mass withdrawal to protest SU's complicity with segregation. Over the weekend of April 2nd, hundreds of students leave SU, hundreds of others want to leave but are unable to do so due to lack of funds for bus fare.
Eventually, the U.S. Supreme Court overturns the "Disturbing the Peace" convictions of the 16 students who were arrested for sitting at "white-only" lunch counters. In 2004 — 44 years after being expelled — they are awarded honorary degrees by Southern University and the state legislature enacts a resolution honoring them.
For more information:
Book: Race and Democracy: The Civil Rights Struggle in Louisiana
Web:
A House Divided Teaching Guide (SIER ~ Tulane Univ)
The Southern University 16 (Black Collegian On Line)
The three major Black colleges in New Orleans are: Dillard University, a private college; Xavier University of Louisiana (XULA), a venerable Catholic institution; and the newly opened Southern University of New Orleans (SUNO), which is state-financed and subject to the Louisiana Board of Education and legislature.
In 1960, close to 40% of New Orleans population is Black. The city's main shopping-commercial avenue is Canal Street where all the stores are white-owned with segregated facilities — Blacks can buy goods but not eat at the lunch counters, the restrooms are segregated, and so on. There is also a Black shopping-commercial district — the second largest in the city after Canal Street — along Dryades Street. Here the stores are also white-owned, but the shoppers are almost all Black. Blacks can use the facilities, yet except for an occasional janitor all of the employees and managers are white. Many of the white store-owners are Jews who are themselves prevented from owning stores on prestigious Canal Street by the same white power-structure that enforces segregation on Blacks.
In late 1959, the Consumers' League of Greater New Orleans — a Black organization led by Reverend Avery Alexander, Reverend A.L. Davis (SCLC), and Dr. Henry Mitchell (NAACP) — is organized to fight employment discrimination by the Dryades Street merchants. Said Reverend Alexander: "There were a hundred stores and there were no Blacks clerking in any of the stores. No managers, no assistant managers. No white collar workers. We didn't believe it was equitable when ninety percent of the customers were Black."
For several months in late 1959 and early 1960 the League negotiates with the Dryades Street merchants — to no avail. Despite their own experience of discrimination as Jews, they refuse to open "white" jobs to Blacks. In April, the League launches a boycott of the Dryades stores that won't employ Blacks as anything but menials.
The boycott is effective. The week before Easter is traditionally a major business peak, but on Good Friday the street is empty of shoppers. A few stores begin to hire Blacks, but most continue to refuse. Over the following months, many stores close or move to the white suburbs rather than hire Blacks. The boycott continues, and customers take their business elsewhere. Dryades Street — once a busy commercial district — becomes a street of abandoned, boarded-up stores.
Students from XULA, SUNO, and Dillard — along with a few white students from Tulane and LSU — join the League picket lines on Dryades Street. When the pickets are temporarily halted by an injunction, they form a CORE chapter led by former XULA student body President Rudy Lombard, Oretha Castle from SUNO, Jerome Smith one of the students who withdrew from Southern University in Baton Rouge, and Hugh Murray a white student from Tulane.
On September 9, the new CORE chapter stages a sit-in at the Woolworth on Canal Street. The integrated group of Blacks and whites are arrested and charged with "Criminal Mischief." The next day, CORE leader Oretha Castle is fired from her job at the Hotel Dieu Hospital: "The good nun gave me my paycheck and said, 'Take it, and get out of here, and don't ever come back.'"
Hampered by lack of bail money, CORE sit-ins continue as funds become available, and the NAACP Youth Council led by Raphael Cassimire pickets the stores to protest segregation and the arrests. Crowds of angry whites taunt, abuse, and attack the CORE and NAACP demonstrators, beating them, scalding them with hot coffee, and throwing acid on them.
On September 16, 1960, CORE field secretary Jim McCain, Reverend Avery Alexander and other members of the Consumer's League are arrested for picketing stores on Claiborne Avenue. 3000 people attend a support rally for the CORE "jailbirds" at the ILA (longshoremans' union) hall, and SCLC leader A. L. Davis opens his church to CORE activists for meetings and training sessions in Non-Violent Resistance.
On September 17, Rudy Lombard, Oretha Castle, Dillard student Cecil Carter, and Tulane student Sydney Goldfinch are arrested for sitting-in at the McCrory's department store lunch counter. As a Jew, Goldfinch is particularly hated by the white power structure. He is charged with "Criminal Anarchy" which carries a potential sentence of 10 years in state prison, his bond is set at $2,500 (equal to $17,000 in 2006). As police repression against the Movement increases, not only are sit-ins and picketers arrested but so too are those whose only "crime" is handing out leaflets.
The New Orleans sit-ins, pickets, boycotts, and arrests continue for years, culminating in the massive Freedom March in September of 1963. Slowly — too slowly — public facilities in New Orleans are desegregated. Passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 overturns all segregation laws, but custom and practice yield slowly, taking years more to change.
For more information:
Book: Race and Democracy: The Civil Rights Struggle in Louisiana
Web: A House Divided (Southern Institute ~ Tulane Univ.)
By spring, sit-ins are breaking out all over the upper & mid-south, and even a few in deep South towns. News coverage and community mass meetings are thrusting young Black students into leadership positions and media spotlights for which they are often unprepared.
Seeing the need for sharing experiences, leadership training, and improving communication between the independent sit-in groups, SCLC's Executive Secretary Ella Baker convinces Dr. King to drain SCLC's meager funds by providing $800 to finance a conference of student sit-in leaders. By letter, Baker invites them, "To share experience gained in recent protest demonstrations and to help chart goals for effective action." Understanding the students' desire for independence, the call to conference states that although "Adult freedom fighters" would be present for "counsel and guidance," the conference would be "youth centered." (King — the most prominent "adult" — is at this time just 31 years old.)
King co-signs Baker's letter, and the conference is held at Shaw University in Raleigh NC over the Easter Weekend (April 15- 17) — just six weeks after the first Greensboro sit-in. 126 student delegates from 58 sit-in centers in 12 states attend, along with delegates from 19 northern colleges, SCLC, CORE, Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR), National Student Association (NSA), and Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). A dozen white students are among the more than 200 participants.
Ella Baker — 55 years old at the time — addresses the assembled students and "adult freedom fighters," telling them that: "The younger generation is challenging you and me, they are asking us to forget our laziness and doubt and fear, and follow our dedication to the truth to the bitter end."
James Lawson of the Nashville sit-ins gives the keynote address, emphasizing both the need for immediate direct-action (as opposed to slow court cases) and the power of Non-Violent Resistance — it's philosophy, strategy, and tactics. His presentation is so powerful that "Nonviolent" becomes part of SNCC's organizational name.
With Baker's support, the students set up their own independent organization rather than become the youth arm of SCLC. They adopt a Founding Statement based on Lawson's presentation. The name they choose for their new organization — "Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee" — clearly states their intentions: "Student" denoting an independent group as opposed to the youth arm of an existing organization, "Nonviolent" indicating their commitment to non-violent direct-action, and "Coordinating Committee" establishing a democratic, non-hierarchical, group-centered culture and structure. Says one student: "The greatest progress of the American Negro in the future will not be made in Congress or in the Supreme Court; it will come in the jails."
Guy Carawan sings a new version of "We Shall Overcome" used by the Nashville students when they were arrested and jailed. Arms crossed and hands joined, gently swaying back and forth, everyone sings the verses that will soon become the anthem of the Freedom Movement: "Black and white together," "We are not afraid," and the refrain, "Deep in my heart, I do believe, we shall overcome some day."
Marion Barry of Fisk University in Nashville is elected as SNCC's first Chairman. Ela Baker and Connie Currie (age 24) are chosen as SNCC's adult advisors. A month later a dozen members of the new coordinating committee meet for the first time in Atlanta on May 13-14. With school terms ending, they hire Jane Stembridge, a white Virginian studying at Union Theologic Seminary in New York, as SNCC's secretary. Ella Baker provides her with a donated desk in a corner of SCLC's Atlanta office, and together they begin raising funds over the summer, arranging for non-violent training for students returning to school in the Fall, maintaining communications between the campus groups, and putting out the first issue of SNCC's newsletter, the Student Voice.
When student sit-ins resume with the Fall term, SNCC plays an increasingly important coordinating and publicizing role. And in the Spring of 1961, when the Freedom Rides are blocked by mob violence in Anniston and Birmingham AL, SNCC sit-in veterans are ready to step up and carry them forward.
And in July of 1960 — the year when so much began — Harvard graduate Bob Moses comes to Atlanta to work on an SCLC voter registration drive. The drive does not materialize, and he begins helping Baker and Stembridge at the SNCC desk. Baker asks him to go down into Alabama and Mississippi to recruit for a SNCC strategy conference scheduled for Atlanta in October. He leaves in August on a journey that will, in time, transform SNCC from a loose association of independent student groups to an organization of organizers fomenting social revolution in the deep south.
For more information:
Books: SNCC (Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee)
Web: Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee
In the late 1950s, the Klan bombs churches and burns schools to oppose desegregation and intimidate Blacks. In response, President Eisenhower introduces a new civil rights bill in 1959.
Under existing law, individual Black citizens have to file civil rights lawsuits against discrimination and abuse. But if they file a lawsuit, they face economic retaliation, beatings, false arrests on trumped up charges, bombings, burnings, and lynching. Since existing civil rights laws cannot be enforced without a lawsuit, if no one dares file a suit the laws have no effect. A primary purpose of the White Citizens Councils is to prevent Blacks from filing or proceding with civil rights cases.
The heart of the new bill is Part III — the same Part III that LBJ had gutted out of the Civil Rights Act of 1957 as the price of avoiding a southern filibuster. This crucial part of the proposed bill would allow the Justice Department to file civil rights suits on its own, obtain injunctions, move civil rights related cases from state to Federal court, and give the U.S. Attorney General the power to intervene directly in southern racial issues.
A majority in the House of Representatives favor the bill, but it is blocked by Congressman Howard Smith of Virginia who is Chairman of the powerful Rules Committee. To stall the bill, he leaves Washington for his farm out in the rural. With the Chairman absent, no action can be taken on the bill. Through a parlimentary maneuver, Representative (later Senator) Emmanuel Celler of New York forces the bill out of committee and it is passed by the House.
In February of 1960, the bill comes up for debate on the Senate floor. As expected, the segregationist southern Democrats (AKA "Dixicrats") stage a filibuster to block passage of any bill containing Part III. Unable to break the flibuster, the Senate drops Part III just as they had in 1957. Shorn of its teeth, the sham bill is then passed as the Civil Rights Act of 1960.
For more information:
Books: Civil Rights Legislation
Web: Civil Rights Act — 1960
In February, 1960, Dr. King moves to Atlanta GA from Montgomery AL. Early in May, he drives author Lillian Smith home after her cancer treatment. Seeing an inter-racial couple in the car, a cop pulls him over. Under Georgia traffic rules, a new resident has 90 days to get a Georgia license. King is still using his Alabama license a few days past that deadline. The cop gives him a ticket. The judge fines King $25 and puts him on 12 months probation. King pays the fine, but is not told about the probation.
Early in October, Dr. King is arrested on a sit-in at Rich's Department Store in Atlanta. The sit-in charges are dropped, but the judge sentences King to four months in jail for violating the traffic ticket probation that he did not know about. Contrary to standard legal practice in a misdemeanor case, the judge refuses to let King out on bail pending appeal. In the dead of night, King is secretly moved to Reidsville State Penitentiary, notorious for its brutal chain gangs and history of mysterious deaths of Black prisoners.
Fearing for Dr. King's life, family, supporters and staff reach out to everyone they know, alerting them to the danger. Both the Kennedy and Nixon campaigns are contacted. Nixon does nothing. John Kennedy makes a personal call to Coretta King to offer his sympathy, his brother Robert calls the judge to ask why bail was denied in a misdemeanor case. The judge then grants bail, and King is released after 8 days incarceration.
A few weeks later, Kennedy defeats Nixon by just .002 of the popular vote — the closest presidential election in living memory (up to that time). Four years earlier, in the election of 1956, Blacks voted Republican ("the party of Lincoln") by a 60% majority. In 1960, JFK gets 70% of the Black vote. Analysts conclude that it is this dramatic shift in Black votes that gives Kennedy his narrow margin of victory in several key northern industrial states (he wins the crucial swing state of Illinois by only 5,000 votes). They attribute this sea-change in Black voting patterns to his gesture of support for Dr. King.
In a speech a month later, Dr. King says: "It is pretty conclusive now that the Negro played a decisive role in electing the president of the United States, and maybe for the first time we can see the power of the ballot and what the ballot can do. Now we must remind Mr. Kennedy that we helped him to get in the White House. We must remind Mr. Kennedy that we are expecting him to use the whole weight of his office to remove the ugly weight of segregation from the shoulders of our nation."
For more information:
Web:
King Encyclopedia (King Institute ~ Stanford Univ.)
Black Voters Key to Putting JFK in White House (Stanford Report)
Martin Luther King, Jr (Thomas Gale Inc.)
In 1960 — six years after Brown v Board of Education — New Orleans still maintains two completely separate, segregated school systems, one for whites and an inferior one for Blacks. Though whites outnumber Blacks in population by roughly 60% to 40%, many white students attend private or parochial schools, so Blacks outnumber whites in the Orleans Parish Public Schools by 52,500 to 38,000 (58% to 42%).
In May of 1960, in the first-ever court-ordered school integration plan, Federal judge Skelly Wright decrees that 1st graders be allowed to enter the nearest formerly-white or formerly-Black school at their option (an approach similar to the Nashville Grade-a-Year plan). White New Orleans is horrified and the school board appalled. If the 7,000 incoming Black 1st graders all choose to attend the nearest white school, two-thirds of white elementary schools would be integrated, and Blacks would greatly outnumber the expected 4,000 white 1st graders.
The Louisiana legislature passes Act 496 granting Governor James Davis the power to "supercede" any school board threatened with an integration court order so that the state would run the schools (the theory being that since Wright's court ruling is directed at the New Orleans School Board, a new round of integration lawsuits would have to be initiated). They also enact a law empowering the governor to close all Louisiana public schools if even a single school anywhere in the state is threatened with integration. (Closing individual integrated schools, or all schools in a given district, had been tried by Governor Faubus in Little Rock and those tactics had already been forbidden by the courts.)
With the help of the White Citizens Council, many white parents begin forming private, white-only schools for their children. Other whites form two organizations — Save Our Schools (SOS) and Committee on Public Education (COPE) — to keep the schools open. These two groups do not support integration, in fact they oppose it, but in effect they indicate a willingness to accept some limited integration if that is the only way to keep the schools open. With their support, the school board files suit against the governor to prevent him from superceding the board or closing the schools.
Just days before school opens on September 8, Judge Wright grants the school board's motion against the governor, and accepts their integration plan based on Louisiana's anti-integration school placement law. This new plan puts the burden on Black parents who now have to apply to transfer their child to a white school, and allows the board to severely limit the number of Blacks permitted to attend a white school (in other words, the new plan is for token integration by a few carefully-selected Black 1st-graders at a couple of white schools rather than across-the-board integration of the entire 1st grade).
In addtion, Wright grants the school board's request to delay integration until November 14 so that they can screen and select the few Black children allowed to integrate a white school. Behind the scenes, the Eisenhower administration also wants to delay integration-day until after the November election because they don't want to face another huge school crises like Little Rock just days before voters cast their ballots in Kennedy vs Nixon and all of the Republican vs Democrate Congressional races.
Despite having publicly promised to integrate Catholic schools no later than the public schools, Archbishop Rummel decides not to integrate the parochial schools so that they remain a segregated option for parents who pull their children out of public school rather than let them sit next to a Black child. The Archbishop piously urges Catholics to pray for "an early solution to the race problem."
As it turns out, only five Black students — all girls — are approved by the school board to transfer to a white school on November 14. It's then discovered that the mother of one of the girls is not married to her father, and because she is "illegitimate" she is dropped from the list, leaving just four. Meanwhile, the governor and legislature frantically pass bill after bill aimed at stopping these little girls from attending a white school, but Judge Wright annuls them as fast as they are signed into law. In a final act of desperation, the legislature declares November 14 a state-wide school holiday and dispatches state troopers to prevent Black children from attending school in New Orleans.
Evading the troopers, Federal marshalls escort the four girls to school, three of them to McDonogh elementary and the 4th — little Ruby Bridges, 6 years old — to Frantz elementary. Whites jeer and curse the girls and the marshalls, but there is no violence or disruption.
Both of the integrated schools are in the Ninth Ward, which in 1960 is the poorest white working-class neighborhood in New Orleans. The Ninth Ward whites resent the New Orleans power elites who maintain segregation in the schools attended by their own children — or, as in the case of Judge Wright, send their kids to private white-only schools — while imposing integration on those whites who have the least influence in the uptown halls of power. In the opinion of NAACP leader Raphael Cassimere, the school board, "... maliciously calculated that if we start at the places where the tension is the greatest, then maybe we can defeat [integration] by showing it just can't work."
The following evening (Nov 15), thousands of whites crowd into the Munciple Auditorium for an anti-integration rally (the Mayor had previously denied the NAACP's request to hold a meeting at the auditorium because he said it would be too "emotional"). White Citizens Council leader Willie Rainach calls on whites to boycott the schools, "Let's use 'scorched-earth' policy. Let's empty the classrooms where they are integrated!" The politically powerful, arch-racist Leander Perez shrieks hatred against Blacks and Jews and urges whites to march against the school board, "Don't wait for your daughter to be raped by these Congolese. Don't wait until the burr-heads are forced into your schools. Do something about it now!"
The next day (Nov 16) a marauding mob of white adults and high school students rampage down Canal Street, into government buildings, and through the downtown area, attacking and beating Blacks on the street. The police do little to deter them until they attack the Mayor's office at which point they are dispersed. White parents withdraw their children from the two integrated elementary schools. Only one teacher, a woman just arrived from Boston, remains at Frantz. She is the only one willing to teach Ruby Bridges.
The White Citizens Council retaliates economically. Ruby's father is fired, and her grandparants evicted from the farm where they had lived and worked for a quarter of a century. A few white parents refuse to withdraw their children from the integrated school, some of them are also fired and one family has to flee the state.
In an effort to close the schools by economic blocade, banks (white-owned, of course) refuse to process checks issued by the school board for money in its accounts, and the city and state refuses to turn over tax revenues intended for schools. By January the school board is unable to pay 1900 school employees. Eventually, the Federal courts threaten bank officials and legislators with Contempt of Court. Facing jail, the segregationists falter, the banks are forced to honor school board checks and funds are pried loose from city and state.
Day after day, the four Black children and the few whites remaining in the integrated schools are forced to run a gauntlet of enraged racists as they enter and leave school each morning and afternoon. Mostly women, the daily mob that gathers outside the two schools call themselves the "cheerleaders." They threaten the children with death, shriek obscenities, and throw things at the students, their parents, and the Federal Marshalls protecting them. By the end of November, McDonogh is empty except for the three Black girls, while at Frantz the entire student body consists of Ruby Bridges and two white kids who brave the mob.
SOS works to encourage white parents to break the boycott and return their children to the two boycotted schools. Slowly, a few white kids come back to class and by the first week in December, there are 23 whites attending Frantz school with Ruby Bridges. The White Citizens Council organizes vicious hate-campaigns of intimidation, harassment, and violence against their parents. Local police are slow and ineffective in offering protection. The FBI — as usual — refuses to involve itself in protecting Blacks or anyone sympathetic to the cause of freedom. Yet, despite these obstacles, Blacks and a few whites persevere, and slowly, very slowly, the white boycott wanes and the "cheerleaders" dwindle.
Over time, those whites most opposed to integration either place their children in white-only private schools, or white-only Catholic schools, or move to the suburbs — a "white-flight" that eventually shifts New Orleans population from majority white to majority Black. In 1960, the Ninth Ward — location of the two integrated schools — is inhabited by poor and working class whites. It is the most impoverished and neglected white neighborhood in the entire city. When Hurricane Katrina hits New Orleans 45 years later, the Ninth Ward is still the most impoverished and neglected in the entire city, but now it is inhabited by Blacks.
For more information:
Books:
Ruby Bridges
Race and Democracy: The Civil Rights Struggle in Louisiana
Web:
Brown v. Board of Education
A House Divided (Southern Institute ~ Tulane Univ.)
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