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By Jerome Teelucksingh |
This series of articles will examine the significant achievements of Afro-Americans during the
Civil Rights period of the 1950's and 1960's. I will attempt to highlight the monumental victories in politics,religion,education,culture,white participation and military which was won after many
weary years of struggling against the forces of oppression and racism. Also in the Civil Rights
era,the development of organizational skills,their resistance to institutionalized racism and the radical attempt to change the status quo will be incorporated in this study.
Counterarguments arguing that the Second Reconstruction partially failed will be included in
presenting a balanced argument.The terms "Afro-Americans" and "blacks" will be used interchangeably to denote the Negro or those of African descent who participated in the movement and the term "white" will be used to describe those of the Anglo-Saxon race.
This work has relevance to contemporary United States history because of the ongoing struggle
of Afro-Americans for equality and better treatment , the still tense black-white relations and the subtle erosion of civil rights gained during the 1960's. Recent events such as the call for the reopening of the case against James Earl Ray accused of assassinating Dr. Martin Luther King,the "Million Man March "in 1996 organized by the Nation of Islam,the Rodney King beating and the O.J Simpson verdict and the spate of movies based on this period appear as a
renewed call to Afro-Americans to arise,account for their conditions and reclaim the hard-won legacies of the movement.
In assessing the significant achievements of the civil rights movement the indicators used will be
the increased opportunities and the visible results which benefited not only Afro-Americans but also allowed whites who were willing to participate in this bid for equality. There will be an examination of historians of the post-Civil Rights period which will be an indicator of the extent that the reforms and social changes were either able to benefit or absent from the lives of Afro-Americans. However it must be taken into consideration that though laws were
passed,policies implemented and statistics seemed to favour Black America,in reality there were still shortcomings and limitations which were dangerously mixed with the successes.
Some of the achievements of the movement have been the right to vote, access to public places, equal right to education and an end to the segregation. These glorious decades are best remembered for the bold strategies,leadership talent,universal participation and the immense sacrifices to ensure a better future.
PARTICIPATION OF WHITES
"The white man,as well as the Negro,is bound and barred by the colour line."
This quote from one of the most brilliant black minds in the America,WEB Dubois established a strong basis for the need for greater white participation in the struggle for justice and equality. It would be inaccurate to make the broad generalization that all whites in the United States were racist and intent upon sabotaging the efforts of the Afro-Americans. The essence ,at least conceived by moderate leaders as Rev. Martin Luther King was to accept whites into the movement who were truly concerned with reform,progress and equality for blacks.
Without participation of the whites , the Civil Rights movement would have seemed to benefit
solely blacks and appear as exclusive of whites.Their contribution is seen in the March on Washington in which of the estimated 250,000 involved, between 75,000 and 95,000 were whites. This was an indicator of the positive response which the Civil Rights movement was heading and the success of the integrationist approach.
Further evidence was in South Carolina, January 1961, two field secretaries of CORE black and
white veterans of the sit-in movement ,Tom Gaither and Gordon Carey organized non- violent training workshops. In October 1963,approximately one hundred white students from the from the prestigious Yale and Stanford universities volunteered to assist in disseminating voter information on the Freedom vote to black neighbourhoods. Also founded in 1960 was the
Students for A Democratic Society (SDS) a northern based organization of mainly whites students who sympathized with the movement. Other individuals who were intent on initiating change was Bernie Schweid, a Southern white bookstore owner sympathetic to the sit-in movement and Joseph Rauh,a white lawyer active in the liberal wing of the National Democratic Party who volunteered to assist the MFDP party enter politics in Mississippi. Not only whites but during the 1960's the Jews also gave full support to the Civil Rights struggle. This is a significant achievement when one takes into consideration the fragile and volatile Afro-American and Jewish relations in contemporary United States society. Rev. King had strongly condemned the anti-Semitism at a New York convention of the United Synagogue of America, and according to a newspaper report.
One of the visions of the Civil Rights movement was the conscious attempt to allow whites
the opportunity to participate in the movement. The voluntary participation of whites helped to not only define the movement as being an integrated effort but it sent a strong ,clear message to the majority of conservative or racist whites who resisted change. The whites willing to make a difference were a minority nevertheless their presence was an indicator of the successful integration efforts that reverberated throughout United States society.
In addition ,the visible support of whites in leadership positions added a defining bi-racial and
interdenominational flavour to the movement. This was most apparent in the historic March on Washington in 1963 which included Rabbi Joachim Prinz of the American Jewish Congress, Matthew Ohmann of the National Catholic Conference of Interracial Justice , Rev. Eugene Blake head of the national Council of Churches and Walter Reuther of United Automobile Workers. The Albany Movement which demanded integration in the bus and railroad was supported by
75 white ministers and rabbis in the community.
These demonstrations of white involvement greatly helped in reducing negative stereotypes between the races. And also decreased the harmful effects of isolated racial incidents and attacks by the Klu Klux Klan (KKK) or the racist White Citizens Council which would have jeopardized the reconciliation process in the movement.
Rhoda Blumberg, a white professor ,was active in the civil rights movement in Illinois and New
Jersey and she was keenly aware of the important financial contributions of whites to the movement. She emphasizes the continued financial support in the late1960's to the NAACP and SCLC because of their integrationist approach and the eventual withdrawal of funding from SNCC and CORE as their policy toward whites became more exclusive to whites.
In the labour industry, there was a similar overwhelming effort to battle the wedge of racism and
create racial harmony. Among the radical workers with a Marxist view , the obstacle to black progress was capitalism ,despite this economic view their belief in participation was consistent with the prevailing views of the movement.
The radical black worker believed that the benefits of racism to the capitalist was "its power to divide the mass of white workers from the black workers and lend him into the employer's camp".Herein lay an ideology which reduced the obvious colour barriers and saw the need for unity of black and white workers in a class struggle against the oppression of the white capitalist controlled culture.
In other areas of labour there were parallelled trends evolving toward unity. In St. Louis, there was evidence of solidarity between the races. The United Auto Workers at the Chrysler truck
plant in St. Louis, Local 110 fielded a slate led by a black candidate for President and a white candidate for Vice President.
In Milwaukee at the American Motors Body Plant, Ted Silverstein won as vice president but more importantly he won on the "Black and White Get It Together" Caucus ticket (BWGIT). This platform had the unique combination of two white and two black running candidates. These positive expressions by blacks and whites in the labour industry were evidence that the decades of the civil rights movement were not in futility .
In the academic field, there was an injection of white historians on the civil rights movement and
they have tended to be considered more objective commentators and even received more attention than their black peers ! Some of these white historians and their works include : Richard Kluger in"Simple Justice"(1975), David Garrow's "Bearing the Cross : Martin Luther King Jr and the
Southern Christian Leadership Conference (1986) "The FBI and Martin Luther King Jr."(1983) and Taylor Branch with "Parting the Waters : America in the King Years 1954-1963" (1988).
When one considers the pervasive nature of the race problem in America then it is easier to understand the difficulties that have arisen in the writing of history. The historian's racial and ethnicity background often enters a debate on his/her ability to be objective in recording and interpreting United States history.
RELIGION
"The Negro's greatest stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is not the .......Klu Klux
Klanner, but the white moderate who is more devoted to order than to justice."
This quote from Martin Luther King's Letter from the Birmingham jail brilliantly diagnosed the
apparent limitations of the movement in the early 1960's. It was through the medium of religion that two of the most prominent leaders Rev. King and Malcolm X spokesman for the Nation of Islam were able to effectively guide the struggle .Both dynamic leaders could boast of large Black Christian and Muslim followings respectively, and were able to transform their religious feelings into a large scale quest for social justice. Rev. King had a vision for the social mission of the Church.
Rev. King persisted in his efforts to make religion more relevant to the needs of the people. In his books "Stride Toward Freedom " he stresses the interrelationship of justice and love as he attempted to combine the spirit and ethic of Jesus with the nonviolent method of Gandhi in his philosophy. The unjustified fears was due primarily to his admiration of Marx's "passion for social justice" King generally identified with Marx's concern for the disinherited ,oppressed and poor.
Through his sermons, Martin Luther King was able to inject into the civil rights movement the much needed moderate approach and forestall the violent eruption of pent up emotions ,racial scars and centuries of suffering.
It was this use of religion as an invaluable tool as the "opium for the masses" which encouraged the positive outlook which served to prod the movement forward. Rev. King differed from other leaders fro instance he saw the racial problem in Montgomery ".....not between Negro citizens and the white citizens of Montgomery, but it is a conflict between justice and injustice, between the forces of light and the forces of darkness".
One of the features during this era was the apparent increased solidarity among Afro-American
Christian churches. the African Methodist Episcopal Church (A.M.E), the African Methodist Episcopal Zion church (A.M.E.Z) and the black Baptists were some of the denominations that temporarily put aside doctrinal differences and internal tensions to create a united front for the civil rights movement.
The high involvement of ministers of religion in the struggle was visibly present. Religion was no longer in the 1950's and 1960's merely a separate, unrelated aspect in the lives of blacks, concerned with sermons and doctrines, it had become entwined with the voice of the oppressed blacks. Evidence of this was Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth, black civil rights activist and minister of Bethel Baptist Church, and founder of the bi-racial Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights (ACMHR).
Other men of the cloth included Rev. James Lawson a thirty -one year old black theology student at Vanderbilt University who in 1959 began the desegregation movement in Nashville . Rev. Lawson was expelled from the university for participating in the lunch counter protests and gained the nation's attention as nine professors at the university threatened to resign over this discriminatory action.
Also in a leadership position was Rev,. Samuel B. Wells who led activists in a"pray-in" who were protesting for integration in Albany,Georgia in 1961-1962. Rev. Andrew Young working at the SCLC headquarters and Rev. Wyatt Tee Walker from Petersburg,Virginia were both staunch civil rights activists. In Chicago, Rev. Jesse Jackson ably coordinated the smooth operation of "Operation Breadbasket" and during the Vietnam war, a temporary pressure group had been formed- "Clergy and Laymen Concerned About Vietnam".
Besides these individual efforts there were religious organizational efforts that attempted to
seek better relations with whites. One successful group of black and white priests was the Brooklyn Methodist Ministers Association and by 1968,there was in existence the National Black Catholic Clergy Caucus and the National Conference of Black Nuns which assiduously worked to remove the racial barriers within religion. Also in this year, the National
Catholic Conference for Interracial Justice was formed and a convention held by the Black Sisters' Conference in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
Though racism had been identified within Roman Catholicism in United States, Lawrence Lucas, a black Catholic priest was aware of the changes which coincided with the civil rights period. He identified the New York Archdiocese ,as having the first, ordained black priest as late as 1952 and in Harlem the first black vicar came as late as 1967. Interestingly, until 1968 there was not a regular column written by blacks in any Catholic paper. However, change within religion was difficult to accept and in 1964 sixty-seven year old Rev. Ashton Jones was jailed for trying to integrate a whites-only church in Atlanta.
Even in the labour industry ,religion extended its arms to offer full support. In 1969 in Charleston, South Carolina the ministry bravely demonstrated support for the hospital strike of black workers in progress. Two outspoken men- Catholic Bishop Ernest Unterkoefler publicly denounced the meagre salaries and inhumane conditions of the workers and Rev. Z.L Grady 's Morris Brown A.M.E Strikers conducted marches and pickets demonstrating their dissatisfaction with the hospital employees.
The clergy persisted in rendering a strong voice of support to the movement, and in Hattiesburg,
Mississippi, ministers from four religious denominations who were working in collaboration with
COFO and SNCC picketed in front of a courthouse . This resulted in the injunction against United Presbyterian Commission On Religion and Race, Episcopal Society for Cultural and Racial Unity, Rabbinical Association of America and the Presbyterian Interracial Council.
The "radical" arm of religion has often been one of the overlooked successes during this period.
This radicalism included primarily Malcolm X and the Nation of Islam but they were also making viable contributions to the movement. An estimated membership of between 65,000 to 100,000 in 1960, this was a group with nationwide appeal especially among the lower class blacks.
Malcolm X has been accused by both blacks in the mainstream civil rights movement and conservative whites as being a "divisive demagogue"and "reverse racist".Indeed However these descriptions of Malcolm X often obscured the positive aspects undertaken by the Nation of Islam. This group of Black Muslims headed by Elijah Muhammad appealed to the depressed
blacks in slums and ghettos.
The Nation of Islam reformed black prostitutes, preached against the evils of alcohol and
drugs and offered a revisionist account of history in which Afro-Americans were prominent, and they probably had the best solution to the urban problems. Malcolm X and the Nation attempted to inculcate a sense of pride among blacks and to reinforce their group identity. The immediate benefit of this to the civil rights movement would be blacks who were psychologically and emotionally stronger to withstand the setbacks of the movement and the rampant, destructive racism.
In terms of social change there was a distinct break with Rev. King who followed a philosophy of
nonviolence and integration, whereas Malcolm X wanted immediate results, reforms and preached that"....Anybody who teaches the Negro to turn the other cheek is committing a crime" of the white injustices against blacks.
This fiery approach was not unjustified, there was a dire need to continuously remind the racist
schizophrenics and conservative elements in the United States of the strong, determined voice of change. And
as he once said to blacks in Harlem,...."Much of what I say might sound like it's hate but it's the
truth....The best thing to put the white man to fright is the truth". Malcolm X saw the political and social reforms not only as agonizingly slow but as unable to keep America racially united.
Both the views of these religious men underwent revisions. After his break with the Nation of Islam in 1964 and the trip to Mecca, Malcolm X "lost" his deep hatred for whites and he viewed the race problems as being part of a racist society. Malcolm's less radical perspective was evident in his launching of the Organization of Afro-American Unity" in which the objective was to elevate the freedom struggle from the civil rights to a higher position of human rights and was now willing to work with other civil rights groups that had similar goals.
Similarly, Rev. King towards the end of his life became somewhat disillusioned with the pace of
the movement and revised some of his views. To a group of ministers in Miami,he proclaimed that "Jesus was not a white man" and in 1966 in South Carolina he was adamant for social justice and cried "there must be a better distribution of wealth, and maybe America must move toward a Democratic Socialism".
This was a definite wake-up call from a predominantly white denomination to Christians in America from accept the racial discrimination as a problem that needed to be immediately addressed.
MILITARY
"We believe that black people should not be forced to fight in the military service to defend a racist government that does not protect us."
This statement by Huey Newton, one of the founders of the Black Panther Party, was long overdue. Blacks in the United States during slavery had often defended their masters' plantations, fought in the nineteenth century Civil War, in World War one and two, the Korean War and the Vietnam War yet they continued to be treated without respect or treated as
equals. The United States society indeed appeared hypocritical because whilst blacks were sacrificing their lives abroad their black brothers and sisters at home were oppressed .
The desegregation of blacks in the United States armed forces had been a landmark achievement.
On July 1948,President Truman announced the equal treatment in the armed forces without regard to race, colour, religion, or national origin. The number of negroes had increased considerably since Truman's order, however the catalyst came soon after in the 1951 Korean War.
The Far East Theater badly lacked soldiers in its combat units and in the Theater there were black
replacements but they were barred from serving on the white units in battlefield because of the existing segregation laws in the army .This led to Far East Commander General Matthew Ridgway to seek official approval of white infantry units to be assigned black riflemen. After approval the experiment of racial integration in the Far East Command begun.
Genuine attempts were being made in most areas of the military to allow for speedier and successful integration of blacks in the military. Visible efforts by the United Stats Organization
(USO) was apparent in the 1960's. Certain reports and conferences acted as a reminder to the military and to society of the constant attack to weed out the germ of segregation.
The "Progress Report on Elimination of Segregation in the Army " on September 1952 not only reported that all training divisions in Alaskan ,Austrian and European Commands had begun integration but that racial desegregation had been progressively removed from 134 units in the Army.
In 1963, President Kennedy offered his full support for these historic changes to the Secretary of
the Army. However in the "Final Report of the Military personnel Stationed Overseas and Membership and Participation in the National Guard" in November 1964,it was revealed that the national guard was the only branch of the armed forces which was not fully integrated.
Steps were being taken to tackle this problem of under- representation in the National Guard and a 1961 report was produced "A Study of the Equality of Treatment and Opportunity in the National Guard" discrimination was revealed in several ways as in some states there was special legislation such as
North Carolina -"The white and coloured militia shall be separately enrolled ,and shall never be compelled to serve in the same organization". There was alsopublic concern from civil rights groups on the negative image of segregation in the military. This was an essential step because during the civil rights period of the 1960's the involvement of blacks increased considerably in the military. There was a higher percentage of blacks (30%) than whites drafted form the Selective Service Lists during this decade. Marable supports this contention, "Blacks totalled about 11-12% of enlisted troops in Vietnam and always comprised significantly higher numbers of combat personnel".
Task forces and committees were organized to ensure that desegregation of the army was prompt and efficient which resulted in an incremental change in the percentage of Afro-Americans in the Navy, Army, Marine Corps and Air Force. It was enlightening for blacks in the military to witness this change in racial attitudes in the military as white officers implemented these reforms.
There was also considerable support emanating from the White House. The Vinson Bill which was being debated in 1963 was designed to make it a court-martial offense for any base commander to prohibit a serviceman from making purchases of goods or services renting housing accommodations or engaging in recreational activities on the basis of race,colour or religion.
Even though certain branches of the military such as the National Guard were still segregated the
experiment in integration appeared to be successful and closely monitored. The statistics indicate a small but positive effect of integration in terms of military admissions. from 1949-1962,the proportion of blacks enlisted in the Air Force and Marines increased from 5-9% and 2-8%.
And from 1945-1962 the percentage of Afro-American Army Officers increased from 1.7% to
3.2%. It must be emphasized that top white were responsible for initiating this change and this was a positive effect.