Oops! I Think I Broke Your Unjust System: The Tactics of the Civil Rights Movement
The Civil Rights Movement rewrote the narrative of the powerful and the oppressed. The movement took an old tale that always ended the same and changed it. The new legend demonstrated the ability of the individual to make substantive change on the environment and the future. The movement illustrated a shift in the power of the minority to participate in the decisions that affected their lives. The effective telling of their story through the broadened reaches of new media provided an opportunity to grab the ear of the public and the truly powerful. By smartly harnessing the microphone and the spotlight, global attention limited local transgressions. At times, the movement’s victory in swaying the public forced the hand of the government to act even when it would rather not. As the movement wore on and the truths spoken to power became too uncomfortable, the government used its movement training to quiet it.
The story, of course, reaches back to the global land grab of the Colombian exchange. Discovery and destruction of an entire hemisphere wound a tight weave around the peoples of the world. Local human aspirations kowtowed to unprecedented global economic demands. Exploitative labor functions poorly if there is no one around to coerce. Consequently, modern slavery promised a solution to the shot callers. The innovators of the slave trade left the social and political implications of commodification of humanity to later generations. Thanks, guys.
The end of slavery in the United States created a treacherous ledge of opportunity and a pit of other problems for those once held in bondage. For reasons political, economic, and psychological, the people of the United States supported an approach to freed slaves that exacerbated their otherness and enhanced their vulnerability in a nation that had employed some elegant language promising exactly the opposite. For seventy years, the country grew, expanded, developed with the tumors of segregation and inequality sapping strength and adding strain.
World War 2 forced recognition that the country suffered a sickness. The logical outcome of the illogic of racism, the Holocaust, haunted a wide swath of Americans of all backgrounds. The failure of appeasement elicited a commitment to personally and vocally oppose injustice. The economic wealth of industrialized war spread to communities usually left out of such largesse. New found prosperity produced both material struts bracing the philosophy of the movement and a fresh perspective toward convention and custom.
For the next ten years, the emerging Cold War established a backdrop of crisis and a “whole world is watching” mentality that intensified the importance of confronting the rotting system. Invasive and culturally unifying technologies infiltrated living rooms. Tentatively, during this period, underreported skirmishes refined strategy while organizations dedicated to social change consolidated membership, funds, and courage. In 1954, the Brown v. Board of Education decision signaled to activists that the federal government lost its unanimity in avoiding the problems of institutional racism by hiding behind arguments of impotence and exhortations to consider the delicate feelings of those committed to keeping the system in place. Finally, parts of one branch of government demonstrated it might occasionally give proponents of change a fair hearing. That was good because the primary intention of the Brown ruling—to desegregate public education—failed miserably: ten years after the decision, one percent of Southern African Americans were educated in integrated schools.
It did not take long for events to pick up the pace thereafter. In 1955, the one person every American student of history can name sat down on a bus and refused to get up to accommodate a white person and got arrested. News of the arrest spread and a strong African American community responded with a well-supported one day boycott. That successful effort enthused leaders who believed they could extend the boycott and its efficacy. Their gamble paid off after a year: segregation in Montgomery public transportation ended.
The Montgomery Bus Boycott also established several principles upon which one strain of the Movement developed. Religion, which infused Southern black culture to such a degree that countless teenagers were punished for listening to Ray Charles’ secular cribs of gospel melodies, provided the organizational structure for the Movement while the seed idea of nonviolent passive resistance demonstrated a useful strategy for some and redemption of the soul for others. More secular strategists recognized that the perception of blacks using physical force to defend rights no one else was going to would stop the movement in its tracks. A smaller group of radical activists believed they had to break with a system that had earlier earned their tacit approval through their cooperation. By accepting the expression of racist hatred upon their bodies, they could transform the system by pulling the evil out of it the way an ice bath reduces a body’s fever.
Two other important tactics advanced the boycott to a substantive challenge. Direct action presented an avenue for political action to those who lacked access to more common methods of change. Voting had not been an option for a long time and petitioning elected officials did more harm than good. Demanding the world conform to a new vision in an obvious physical way caused uncomfortable dissonance on the immediate targets (and most folks dislike being a party to a conflict). Images of direct action forced distant viewers (unused to the power of seeing history happen because of the newness of television) to think about a social system in which they had no personal, vested interest. Often, though, they did have sympathy for the underdog, a developing philosophical opposition to institutional racism, and a sense of a lack of justice: not exactly a good recipe for keeping things like they had always been.
Finally, and this is underemphasized in Movement histories, they hit the wider community where it hurts—the wallet. Movement campaigns, sensibly, focused on pressuring people who had always needed black patronage but preferred not to have the actual patron to choose between one or the other. In Montgomery, the bus lines fed on the need of blacks to travel from their part of the city to do the work of white Montgomery. Frustrated wives of city officials, dependent on their black domestic to keep up with the Jones’, drove over notions of white power to go pick up their stranded maids. Broke, the bus company tapped out long before the city called an end to the match.
Close to a year after Montgomery revealed the armor’s kinks, another challenge erupted in Little Rock. Officials there, determining integration an undeniable, if unfortunate, matter of fact, devised an integration plan that symbolized what calm, rational people can create. The governor, bearing the distinctive name of Orval Faubus, sensed political gain in chucking the whole thing out the window. He hijacked the plan, attempting to prevent it by manipulating racist fears and then letting it play out in the streets. He managed to traumatize the nine kids chosen for the first wave of integration and provoking a reluctant president into calling out 101st Airborne along with federalizing the National Guard to keep order for the students’ first year and ensure compliance with federal mandates.
That was the last lesson of the civil rights campaigns in the 50s: the federal government could be shown that it had a dog in the fight. It was a very big dog. In subsequent campaigns, if the federal government could be coaxed to act, it would enforce the newly minted demand for desegregation. Unfortunately, getting the government to recognize its responsibility usually required a blood tribute.
On February 4, 1960, four A&M students sat down at a lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina and demanded to be served. That is the sentence that always begins the part about sit-ins in books and articles. Those four men unleashed a wave of discomfiting confrontation throughout the South. Independent, usually young activists, meticulously sheltered from the brutal realities of Jim Crow by their elders, took the cue and organized their own actions, targeting every instance of segregation in their own communities. Lunch counters, libraries, zoos, beaches, parks—all places where people went, black and white both, to pretend the shameful separation did not exist. Lacking challenge to federal law or court order, these folks were on their own. Offering their bodies, they filled the jails and forced a logistical nightmare on duly constituted authority. Sometimes, the levee broke and local laws quickly transformed. In other places, it took years.
In 1961, the Freedom Rides attempted to channel that momentum into a decisive national victory for the movement. The initial thinking went something like, “The ICC declared that interstate travel and the facilities supporting it must be integrated. On our way to a movement conference in Louisiana, we will test whether the Southern states are following the rules. We will help laws that require integration get enforced. It will be productive.”
The thinking changed dramatically once the busses hit Alabama. Then it was more like, “The Klan is making sure we can’t get out of the bus. Oh, look—a firebomb.“ The threat of Communist asymmetric warfare and its agents, the jarring revelation that “their” blacks were clearly not content, and mythic legacies of the South’s past aggravated white unease into terrorism (again). The level of violence directed at this small group of committed activists shocked them, the nation, and the President. Obviously, they had never attempted to steal a juicy steak from a rabid Rottweiler before.
A state of emergency existed and the President and his staff reluctantly focused on “domestic” affairs. Perceiving the public relations nightmare to follow if Pravda accurately reported the slaughter of Americans attempting to travel in accordance with the laws of the land, the federal reaction was swift, powerful, and temporary: military support shielded the busses from racist violence in Alabama. The activists passed the border into Mississippi, where cagier defenders of tradition simply arrested in the activists, punishing them away from the light of media in Parchman Penitentiary. For the federal government, the unwanted crisis passed. Needless to say, the activists never made it to the conference.
The Freedom Rides paved the way for more confrontation and violence. Challenges to the system led to the power structure in the South bloviating, marshaling the frantic masses into storm troopers, ready to fight a new war against change. Movement activists completed the polarization, refusing federal entreaties to let time works its healing wonders.
The boil on the body politic burst in Birmingham. A campaign encompassing multiple objectives organized by the Southern Christian Leadership Conference forced the nation to decide which side it was on. The movement leaders decided that if one could commit oneself to Christ then one could put one’s bodies on the line for worldly justice. Practically, this meant that children as young as six could participate. And they did: they sang and marched their way into the dogs and fire hoses of Eugene “Bull” Connor’s resistance. The public airing of children being attacked by dogs sickened distant viewers of media.
Then the resistance overreached. A bomb exploded in a church murdering four little girls and galvanizing a nation to demand the end of this insanity. Events then moved quickly: the March on Washington gave shape to a new vision, clearly and poetically preached by Martin Luther King, Jr. The assassination of John Kennedy allowed the ascension of the most curious and effective partner the movement was likely to find in the establishment: Lyndon Baines Johnson. Politically astute and committed to a leaving a legacy of justice (which didn’t quite work out), he evoked the memory of a fallen president to his ends and secured passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
A landmark piece of legislation, the Act ratified that the activists’ view had been right. It promised more sustained partnership with the agents of change and a legal framework within which to do the work. It also signaled a cultural shift in the country supporting the ideals of integration. It rebalanced scales that had been lopsided for hundreds of years even if the segregation in many places only moved from de jure to de facto.
The achievement of the Civil Rights Act ratified the tactics of direct action, passive resistance, and nonviolence and created a butterfly effect for other movements, other places, and other times. In a strange, kind of dialectical way, official reaction to these tactics led to the emergence of another strand of the movement: the effort to rescue the electoral process in the South from its servile toadyism. Thinking hard about what a hassle all the civil rights movement stuff was, the Kennedy administration suggested to activists a different objective: voter registration. Surely, registering voters in a country where the whole democratic experiment began would be less controversial than publicly getting all up in racist faces. The administration held out a carrot of some financial support for the campaign. For Kennedy officials, the distinct possibility that most of the newly registered would probably be Democratic made the proposal all the more appetizing.
Movement activists kept looking back and forth between the Kennedy people and whatever 1960s version of Powerpoint delivered the voter registration idea in disbelief. The basic assumption—voter registration of southern blacks as a blander alternative to direct action—was so fundamentally flawed that it could only have been conceived in Camelot. The government people estimated that people who resorted to violent fits when confronted with an etiquette of equality would peacefully and harmoniously allow the dissolution of their political power. Movement activists understood the incendiary (probably literally) nature of the idea. Since many of them understood the world through a prism of radicalized spirituality, some of them decided rural Mississippi a modern-day temple worthy of cleansing.
Voter registration in the hardcore South presented new challenges. Largely rural and ignored by the outside world, the activists would be trying to register voters away from the prying eyes of the more temperate. The response of local whites caused activists to promptly set to the side the idealized notions of passive nonviolence. More than one civil rights worker knew where the shotgun was and how to use it. They also became really good at organizing because they were now effectively a group of partisans working behind enemy lines. Organizers quickly devised tactics that attempted to protect both local supporters and migrant activists.
One tactic imported a large number of highly idealistic, committed, wealthy, white college students to shield the more tenured and ethnically diverse workers from being murdered without official notice. Either these students would witness the normalized racist violence and compel their establishment kin to raise a stink OR they would fall victim to the normalized racist violence and tragically compel their establishment kin to raise a massive stink. In the meantime, they could help register voters.
Almost immediately, three civil rights workers found themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time. Of the three, two were Northern and white. Their (the white folks’) disappearance triggered a wave of new found outrage at ancient conditions in the South. President Johnson demanded action. The FBI actually investigated, for once. They kept finding bodies they weren’t even looking for. A couple of months after the disappearance, the bodies were recovered and suspicions confirmed for the activists: white lives were more important than black ones.
While this storm buffeted public opinion, the volunteers organized a dynamic and persuasive protest. Lining up rural blacks in front of the voter registrar only to be rejected lost its novelty quickly, especially when the effort included gunplay, physical assaults, and people taking names of participants as potential candidates for further gunplay and physical assaults. The organizers erected instead a faux Democratic Party, one that allowed the participation of anyone who wished to participate. This Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) became the locus for a broad effort to improve the lives of the rural blacks upon who so much depended. Volunteers taught literacy and citizenship in Freedom Schools. Thoughtful and famous entertainers performed for people who probably had no idea who they were but were appreciative anyway.
The MFDP and the Freedom Schools laid the groundwork for the ultimate protest at the end of the summer: attempting to replace the white, official Mississippi Democratic Party at the Democratic Convention in Atlantic City. It would be a stark display of guerilla political theater: confronting this purportedly democratic (with a little “d”) body and presenting it with a clear, moral choice in front of the whole world. Many of the participants, both the organizers and the African-Americans at the center of whole affair, got caught up in the drama and thought, even though they should not have, that they might really change things; that their just cause deserved the kind of conclusion reserved for sports movies. Thus, the real, albeit partial, victory they did achieve possessed the appeal of sexy clothes on a frumpy lady. They served as the catalyst for an incredible transformation of the political landscapes, local to national.
They forced the Democratic Party to acknowledge its undemocratic methods and secured a commitment for representative representation within the party by the next convention. They, along with the murder of the civil rights workers, created a groundswell of support and presidential commitment to the passage of a piece of legislation that, unlike most of pieces of legislation ever, proved both visionary and effective: the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The mechanism of the Voting Rights Act, federal registrars in the parts of the country that exhibited the most egregious disenfranchisement, loosened the death grip of racism on the regular political process in the South that it allowed such a remarkably rapid transfer of power to people living in this century that it uses only a smidge of hyperbole to call it a revolution. In 1966, Julian Bond, a pretty important civil rights worker, was both elected to the Georgia state legislature and then denied a seat not because of his commitment to civil rights but because of his opposition to Vietnam! Throughout the South, local power structures were overthrown and new coalitions of political opinions took up the reins. Rapidly, ambitious Southern politicians adjusted their rhetoric, reached out to new constituencies, and took their stories of the scales falling off their eyes public, crocodile tears falling from the now-seeing eyes and everything. New representatives, some of color, took to the hustings. Once held hostage by past legacies, a more inclusive political vision shaped into concrete reality. Neither a perfect nor final solution to the problems of race in America, the Voting Rights Act and the realignment it initiated redressed more injustice than anything else.
Many Americans thought the whole unseemly business concluded with the passage of the sibling laws in 1964 and 1965 and the new national consensus buttressing them. They were wrong. Anybody with their ear to the ground might have noticed the rumblings. Granted, the rumblings had rumbled as far back as anyone wanted to remember. Urban blacks living alongside the bastard progeny of racism and poverty in de facto ghettos dealt with fundamentally different problems than Southern rural blacks or increasingly suburban whites. The émigrés of the Great Migration had little use for a Civil Rights Act that said they could eat with whites when there were not any whites around to eat with or a Voting Rights Act that protected their franchise but not their person from random police brutality.
The third strand of the movement demanded solutions to an incorporeal, pervasive inequality that oppressed more thoroughly than some bumbling Klan Klavern ever dreamed of. Black Power fell squarely in a tradition of unapologetic black resistance: W.E.B. DuBois, Marcus Garvey, Robert Williams, Malcolm X refused to adopt the temperate, careful language of civil rights leaders focused on integration. Speaking the truth in ways that made people feel guilty, their style offended and provoked like your aunt that lacks both a filter and tact but not insight. Their analysis led to revolutionary demands. Alarmed, powerful enemies of this strain of the movement collaborated to terminate this threat BY ANY MEANS NECESSARY.
Religion infused the rhetoric of the leadership of the traditional civil rights movement; the themes of forgiveness and redemption skittered across the writings and speeches of those attempting to advance integration. Black Power advocates contrasted these notions with an unforgiving, confrontational posture that called whites to account and argued for redress that would certainly hurt. They coopted symbols of power and paraded them, intent on provocation. The strategy went over like gangbusters, literally. Some people watching the Black Panthers brandish their guns publicly felt a strong urge to match and escalate. Sometimes, those people were in a position to actually do that.
The basic premise of their argument lacked the stunning obscenity of blacks with leather-clad pockets overflowing with Little Red Books and Saturday Night Specials. For Black Power advocates, the central problem lie in the integrationists’ argument that room should be made at the table for blacks. To many experiencing the exploitations and degradations of 1960s urban life, wanting to have a seat where no one wanted you was a weird thing to want. Consistently, what Black Power preachers wanted was a rebalancing of political power, economic control, and cultural space. There should be, essentially, two tables. Ultimately, they argued for that which became known as participatory democracy but they wanted to do their participating as a bloc. And they didn’t want it to be a lie. They wanted power.
Scandalous behavior combined with a serious and fairly justifiable demand for power meant some fundamental mores had been broken. Many blacks expressed unease and reticence with the more flamboyant elements of Black Power. Many regular white folks’ attempt to see things from a different perspective ended and returned to the comfort of intellectual homogeneity. Powerful sectors within media and government responded violently and punitively and everybody let them do it. In order to break Black Power, the powerful and the official were granted exemptions from the Constitution and its guiding principles (again). The FBI and other law enforcement agencies played a long and lethal game of dirty pool in their attempt to eradicate Black Power organizations from the political landscape.
Black Power advocates could not withstand the withering fire of bureaucratically conceived, executed, and coordinated battle plans. They leapt behind the closest burned-out car and kept their heads down. Some were sacrificed to the cemetery or prison. Some quit the battle and the country all together, giving up on both. Others invested themselves in a long game of finding positions of local power and quietly converting, face to face, one by one. The legacy of Black Power is mixed: largely unsuccessful in achieving their vision of change, they were instrumental in altering the cultural atmosphere surrounding being Black in America. This transformation has slowly modified the underlying attitudes of people breathing this new air into something unexpected. Young Americans think about the world and race in a profoundly different way.
All three strands of the movement informed and educated people in other places, times, and circumstances. Nonviolent direct action forced participants and spectators to choose a side. Electoral protest demolished the foundation of official racism. Black Power showed the limits of the present but the possibilities of the future. The blueprint of the Civil Rights Movement—collaborative, principled, courageous actions, transmitted to the interested but uninvested, can compel faceless governing structures to act and address—requires editing but allows other groups a starting point to do the same. Achieving a global transformation of the relationship between the bully and the persecuted probably never entered the minds of those who did something to advance the movement. But because those everyday people did something then, the world has the opportunity to tell itself a new story.
The story, of course, reaches back to the global land grab of the Colombian exchange. Discovery and destruction of an entire hemisphere wound a tight weave around the peoples of the world. Local human aspirations kowtowed to unprecedented global economic demands. Exploitative labor functions poorly if there is no one around to coerce. Consequently, modern slavery promised a solution to the shot callers. The innovators of the slave trade left the social and political implications of commodification of humanity to later generations. Thanks, guys.
The end of slavery in the United States created a treacherous ledge of opportunity and a pit of other problems for those once held in bondage. For reasons political, economic, and psychological, the people of the United States supported an approach to freed slaves that exacerbated their otherness and enhanced their vulnerability in a nation that had employed some elegant language promising exactly the opposite. For seventy years, the country grew, expanded, developed with the tumors of segregation and inequality sapping strength and adding strain.
World War 2 forced recognition that the country suffered a sickness. The logical outcome of the illogic of racism, the Holocaust, haunted a wide swath of Americans of all backgrounds. The failure of appeasement elicited a commitment to personally and vocally oppose injustice. The economic wealth of industrialized war spread to communities usually left out of such largesse. New found prosperity produced both material struts bracing the philosophy of the movement and a fresh perspective toward convention and custom.
For the next ten years, the emerging Cold War established a backdrop of crisis and a “whole world is watching” mentality that intensified the importance of confronting the rotting system. Invasive and culturally unifying technologies infiltrated living rooms. Tentatively, during this period, underreported skirmishes refined strategy while organizations dedicated to social change consolidated membership, funds, and courage. In 1954, the Brown v. Board of Education decision signaled to activists that the federal government lost its unanimity in avoiding the problems of institutional racism by hiding behind arguments of impotence and exhortations to consider the delicate feelings of those committed to keeping the system in place. Finally, parts of one branch of government demonstrated it might occasionally give proponents of change a fair hearing. That was good because the primary intention of the Brown ruling—to desegregate public education—failed miserably: ten years after the decision, one percent of Southern African Americans were educated in integrated schools.
It did not take long for events to pick up the pace thereafter. In 1955, the one person every American student of history can name sat down on a bus and refused to get up to accommodate a white person and got arrested. News of the arrest spread and a strong African American community responded with a well-supported one day boycott. That successful effort enthused leaders who believed they could extend the boycott and its efficacy. Their gamble paid off after a year: segregation in Montgomery public transportation ended.
The Montgomery Bus Boycott also established several principles upon which one strain of the Movement developed. Religion, which infused Southern black culture to such a degree that countless teenagers were punished for listening to Ray Charles’ secular cribs of gospel melodies, provided the organizational structure for the Movement while the seed idea of nonviolent passive resistance demonstrated a useful strategy for some and redemption of the soul for others. More secular strategists recognized that the perception of blacks using physical force to defend rights no one else was going to would stop the movement in its tracks. A smaller group of radical activists believed they had to break with a system that had earlier earned their tacit approval through their cooperation. By accepting the expression of racist hatred upon their bodies, they could transform the system by pulling the evil out of it the way an ice bath reduces a body’s fever.
Two other important tactics advanced the boycott to a substantive challenge. Direct action presented an avenue for political action to those who lacked access to more common methods of change. Voting had not been an option for a long time and petitioning elected officials did more harm than good. Demanding the world conform to a new vision in an obvious physical way caused uncomfortable dissonance on the immediate targets (and most folks dislike being a party to a conflict). Images of direct action forced distant viewers (unused to the power of seeing history happen because of the newness of television) to think about a social system in which they had no personal, vested interest. Often, though, they did have sympathy for the underdog, a developing philosophical opposition to institutional racism, and a sense of a lack of justice: not exactly a good recipe for keeping things like they had always been.
Finally, and this is underemphasized in Movement histories, they hit the wider community where it hurts—the wallet. Movement campaigns, sensibly, focused on pressuring people who had always needed black patronage but preferred not to have the actual patron to choose between one or the other. In Montgomery, the bus lines fed on the need of blacks to travel from their part of the city to do the work of white Montgomery. Frustrated wives of city officials, dependent on their black domestic to keep up with the Jones’, drove over notions of white power to go pick up their stranded maids. Broke, the bus company tapped out long before the city called an end to the match.
Close to a year after Montgomery revealed the armor’s kinks, another challenge erupted in Little Rock. Officials there, determining integration an undeniable, if unfortunate, matter of fact, devised an integration plan that symbolized what calm, rational people can create. The governor, bearing the distinctive name of Orval Faubus, sensed political gain in chucking the whole thing out the window. He hijacked the plan, attempting to prevent it by manipulating racist fears and then letting it play out in the streets. He managed to traumatize the nine kids chosen for the first wave of integration and provoking a reluctant president into calling out 101st Airborne along with federalizing the National Guard to keep order for the students’ first year and ensure compliance with federal mandates.
That was the last lesson of the civil rights campaigns in the 50s: the federal government could be shown that it had a dog in the fight. It was a very big dog. In subsequent campaigns, if the federal government could be coaxed to act, it would enforce the newly minted demand for desegregation. Unfortunately, getting the government to recognize its responsibility usually required a blood tribute.
On February 4, 1960, four A&M students sat down at a lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina and demanded to be served. That is the sentence that always begins the part about sit-ins in books and articles. Those four men unleashed a wave of discomfiting confrontation throughout the South. Independent, usually young activists, meticulously sheltered from the brutal realities of Jim Crow by their elders, took the cue and organized their own actions, targeting every instance of segregation in their own communities. Lunch counters, libraries, zoos, beaches, parks—all places where people went, black and white both, to pretend the shameful separation did not exist. Lacking challenge to federal law or court order, these folks were on their own. Offering their bodies, they filled the jails and forced a logistical nightmare on duly constituted authority. Sometimes, the levee broke and local laws quickly transformed. In other places, it took years.
In 1961, the Freedom Rides attempted to channel that momentum into a decisive national victory for the movement. The initial thinking went something like, “The ICC declared that interstate travel and the facilities supporting it must be integrated. On our way to a movement conference in Louisiana, we will test whether the Southern states are following the rules. We will help laws that require integration get enforced. It will be productive.”
The thinking changed dramatically once the busses hit Alabama. Then it was more like, “The Klan is making sure we can’t get out of the bus. Oh, look—a firebomb.“ The threat of Communist asymmetric warfare and its agents, the jarring revelation that “their” blacks were clearly not content, and mythic legacies of the South’s past aggravated white unease into terrorism (again). The level of violence directed at this small group of committed activists shocked them, the nation, and the President. Obviously, they had never attempted to steal a juicy steak from a rabid Rottweiler before.
A state of emergency existed and the President and his staff reluctantly focused on “domestic” affairs. Perceiving the public relations nightmare to follow if Pravda accurately reported the slaughter of Americans attempting to travel in accordance with the laws of the land, the federal reaction was swift, powerful, and temporary: military support shielded the busses from racist violence in Alabama. The activists passed the border into Mississippi, where cagier defenders of tradition simply arrested in the activists, punishing them away from the light of media in Parchman Penitentiary. For the federal government, the unwanted crisis passed. Needless to say, the activists never made it to the conference.
The Freedom Rides paved the way for more confrontation and violence. Challenges to the system led to the power structure in the South bloviating, marshaling the frantic masses into storm troopers, ready to fight a new war against change. Movement activists completed the polarization, refusing federal entreaties to let time works its healing wonders.
The boil on the body politic burst in Birmingham. A campaign encompassing multiple objectives organized by the Southern Christian Leadership Conference forced the nation to decide which side it was on. The movement leaders decided that if one could commit oneself to Christ then one could put one’s bodies on the line for worldly justice. Practically, this meant that children as young as six could participate. And they did: they sang and marched their way into the dogs and fire hoses of Eugene “Bull” Connor’s resistance. The public airing of children being attacked by dogs sickened distant viewers of media.
Then the resistance overreached. A bomb exploded in a church murdering four little girls and galvanizing a nation to demand the end of this insanity. Events then moved quickly: the March on Washington gave shape to a new vision, clearly and poetically preached by Martin Luther King, Jr. The assassination of John Kennedy allowed the ascension of the most curious and effective partner the movement was likely to find in the establishment: Lyndon Baines Johnson. Politically astute and committed to a leaving a legacy of justice (which didn’t quite work out), he evoked the memory of a fallen president to his ends and secured passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
A landmark piece of legislation, the Act ratified that the activists’ view had been right. It promised more sustained partnership with the agents of change and a legal framework within which to do the work. It also signaled a cultural shift in the country supporting the ideals of integration. It rebalanced scales that had been lopsided for hundreds of years even if the segregation in many places only moved from de jure to de facto.
The achievement of the Civil Rights Act ratified the tactics of direct action, passive resistance, and nonviolence and created a butterfly effect for other movements, other places, and other times. In a strange, kind of dialectical way, official reaction to these tactics led to the emergence of another strand of the movement: the effort to rescue the electoral process in the South from its servile toadyism. Thinking hard about what a hassle all the civil rights movement stuff was, the Kennedy administration suggested to activists a different objective: voter registration. Surely, registering voters in a country where the whole democratic experiment began would be less controversial than publicly getting all up in racist faces. The administration held out a carrot of some financial support for the campaign. For Kennedy officials, the distinct possibility that most of the newly registered would probably be Democratic made the proposal all the more appetizing.
Movement activists kept looking back and forth between the Kennedy people and whatever 1960s version of Powerpoint delivered the voter registration idea in disbelief. The basic assumption—voter registration of southern blacks as a blander alternative to direct action—was so fundamentally flawed that it could only have been conceived in Camelot. The government people estimated that people who resorted to violent fits when confronted with an etiquette of equality would peacefully and harmoniously allow the dissolution of their political power. Movement activists understood the incendiary (probably literally) nature of the idea. Since many of them understood the world through a prism of radicalized spirituality, some of them decided rural Mississippi a modern-day temple worthy of cleansing.
Voter registration in the hardcore South presented new challenges. Largely rural and ignored by the outside world, the activists would be trying to register voters away from the prying eyes of the more temperate. The response of local whites caused activists to promptly set to the side the idealized notions of passive nonviolence. More than one civil rights worker knew where the shotgun was and how to use it. They also became really good at organizing because they were now effectively a group of partisans working behind enemy lines. Organizers quickly devised tactics that attempted to protect both local supporters and migrant activists.
One tactic imported a large number of highly idealistic, committed, wealthy, white college students to shield the more tenured and ethnically diverse workers from being murdered without official notice. Either these students would witness the normalized racist violence and compel their establishment kin to raise a stink OR they would fall victim to the normalized racist violence and tragically compel their establishment kin to raise a massive stink. In the meantime, they could help register voters.
Almost immediately, three civil rights workers found themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time. Of the three, two were Northern and white. Their (the white folks’) disappearance triggered a wave of new found outrage at ancient conditions in the South. President Johnson demanded action. The FBI actually investigated, for once. They kept finding bodies they weren’t even looking for. A couple of months after the disappearance, the bodies were recovered and suspicions confirmed for the activists: white lives were more important than black ones.
While this storm buffeted public opinion, the volunteers organized a dynamic and persuasive protest. Lining up rural blacks in front of the voter registrar only to be rejected lost its novelty quickly, especially when the effort included gunplay, physical assaults, and people taking names of participants as potential candidates for further gunplay and physical assaults. The organizers erected instead a faux Democratic Party, one that allowed the participation of anyone who wished to participate. This Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) became the locus for a broad effort to improve the lives of the rural blacks upon who so much depended. Volunteers taught literacy and citizenship in Freedom Schools. Thoughtful and famous entertainers performed for people who probably had no idea who they were but were appreciative anyway.
The MFDP and the Freedom Schools laid the groundwork for the ultimate protest at the end of the summer: attempting to replace the white, official Mississippi Democratic Party at the Democratic Convention in Atlantic City. It would be a stark display of guerilla political theater: confronting this purportedly democratic (with a little “d”) body and presenting it with a clear, moral choice in front of the whole world. Many of the participants, both the organizers and the African-Americans at the center of whole affair, got caught up in the drama and thought, even though they should not have, that they might really change things; that their just cause deserved the kind of conclusion reserved for sports movies. Thus, the real, albeit partial, victory they did achieve possessed the appeal of sexy clothes on a frumpy lady. They served as the catalyst for an incredible transformation of the political landscapes, local to national.
They forced the Democratic Party to acknowledge its undemocratic methods and secured a commitment for representative representation within the party by the next convention. They, along with the murder of the civil rights workers, created a groundswell of support and presidential commitment to the passage of a piece of legislation that, unlike most of pieces of legislation ever, proved both visionary and effective: the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The mechanism of the Voting Rights Act, federal registrars in the parts of the country that exhibited the most egregious disenfranchisement, loosened the death grip of racism on the regular political process in the South that it allowed such a remarkably rapid transfer of power to people living in this century that it uses only a smidge of hyperbole to call it a revolution. In 1966, Julian Bond, a pretty important civil rights worker, was both elected to the Georgia state legislature and then denied a seat not because of his commitment to civil rights but because of his opposition to Vietnam! Throughout the South, local power structures were overthrown and new coalitions of political opinions took up the reins. Rapidly, ambitious Southern politicians adjusted their rhetoric, reached out to new constituencies, and took their stories of the scales falling off their eyes public, crocodile tears falling from the now-seeing eyes and everything. New representatives, some of color, took to the hustings. Once held hostage by past legacies, a more inclusive political vision shaped into concrete reality. Neither a perfect nor final solution to the problems of race in America, the Voting Rights Act and the realignment it initiated redressed more injustice than anything else.
Many Americans thought the whole unseemly business concluded with the passage of the sibling laws in 1964 and 1965 and the new national consensus buttressing them. They were wrong. Anybody with their ear to the ground might have noticed the rumblings. Granted, the rumblings had rumbled as far back as anyone wanted to remember. Urban blacks living alongside the bastard progeny of racism and poverty in de facto ghettos dealt with fundamentally different problems than Southern rural blacks or increasingly suburban whites. The émigrés of the Great Migration had little use for a Civil Rights Act that said they could eat with whites when there were not any whites around to eat with or a Voting Rights Act that protected their franchise but not their person from random police brutality.
The third strand of the movement demanded solutions to an incorporeal, pervasive inequality that oppressed more thoroughly than some bumbling Klan Klavern ever dreamed of. Black Power fell squarely in a tradition of unapologetic black resistance: W.E.B. DuBois, Marcus Garvey, Robert Williams, Malcolm X refused to adopt the temperate, careful language of civil rights leaders focused on integration. Speaking the truth in ways that made people feel guilty, their style offended and provoked like your aunt that lacks both a filter and tact but not insight. Their analysis led to revolutionary demands. Alarmed, powerful enemies of this strain of the movement collaborated to terminate this threat BY ANY MEANS NECESSARY.
Religion infused the rhetoric of the leadership of the traditional civil rights movement; the themes of forgiveness and redemption skittered across the writings and speeches of those attempting to advance integration. Black Power advocates contrasted these notions with an unforgiving, confrontational posture that called whites to account and argued for redress that would certainly hurt. They coopted symbols of power and paraded them, intent on provocation. The strategy went over like gangbusters, literally. Some people watching the Black Panthers brandish their guns publicly felt a strong urge to match and escalate. Sometimes, those people were in a position to actually do that.
The basic premise of their argument lacked the stunning obscenity of blacks with leather-clad pockets overflowing with Little Red Books and Saturday Night Specials. For Black Power advocates, the central problem lie in the integrationists’ argument that room should be made at the table for blacks. To many experiencing the exploitations and degradations of 1960s urban life, wanting to have a seat where no one wanted you was a weird thing to want. Consistently, what Black Power preachers wanted was a rebalancing of political power, economic control, and cultural space. There should be, essentially, two tables. Ultimately, they argued for that which became known as participatory democracy but they wanted to do their participating as a bloc. And they didn’t want it to be a lie. They wanted power.
Scandalous behavior combined with a serious and fairly justifiable demand for power meant some fundamental mores had been broken. Many blacks expressed unease and reticence with the more flamboyant elements of Black Power. Many regular white folks’ attempt to see things from a different perspective ended and returned to the comfort of intellectual homogeneity. Powerful sectors within media and government responded violently and punitively and everybody let them do it. In order to break Black Power, the powerful and the official were granted exemptions from the Constitution and its guiding principles (again). The FBI and other law enforcement agencies played a long and lethal game of dirty pool in their attempt to eradicate Black Power organizations from the political landscape.
Black Power advocates could not withstand the withering fire of bureaucratically conceived, executed, and coordinated battle plans. They leapt behind the closest burned-out car and kept their heads down. Some were sacrificed to the cemetery or prison. Some quit the battle and the country all together, giving up on both. Others invested themselves in a long game of finding positions of local power and quietly converting, face to face, one by one. The legacy of Black Power is mixed: largely unsuccessful in achieving their vision of change, they were instrumental in altering the cultural atmosphere surrounding being Black in America. This transformation has slowly modified the underlying attitudes of people breathing this new air into something unexpected. Young Americans think about the world and race in a profoundly different way.
All three strands of the movement informed and educated people in other places, times, and circumstances. Nonviolent direct action forced participants and spectators to choose a side. Electoral protest demolished the foundation of official racism. Black Power showed the limits of the present but the possibilities of the future. The blueprint of the Civil Rights Movement—collaborative, principled, courageous actions, transmitted to the interested but uninvested, can compel faceless governing structures to act and address—requires editing but allows other groups a starting point to do the same. Achieving a global transformation of the relationship between the bully and the persecuted probably never entered the minds of those who did something to advance the movement. But because those everyday people did something then, the world has the opportunity to tell itself a new story.