The Era for the Movements for Civil Rights, 1941-1973…and Beyond?

Asa Philip Randolph was the architect of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, an all-black union and one of the most powerful in the United States (and as a quick aside, a sleeping car porter was basically like a steward or a on an airplane – they took care of all of your needs if you were traveling in a sleeping car on a train, a sleeping car meaning a railway car that had rooms with beds). He was also largely responsible for forcing the hand of President Roosevelt in issuing Executive Order 8802 in June of 1941, which established the Fair Employment Practices Commission, aimed at eliminating racial discrimination in hiring in the national defense industry, and also desegregated the defense industry. Randolph‘s threat to have 100,000 black men march on Washington was, to quote FDR, “like a gun pointed at my head.” Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., would count Randolph as one of his most important sources of inspiration, which is why he was given a place of honor near King when he gave his “I have a dream” speech in Washington, D.C. in 1963. The following political cartoons on this topic are courtesy of the inimitable Theodore Geisel, otherwise known as Dr. Seuss.

The “Double ‘V’ for Victory” Campaign was established by the NAACP in early 1942 after the U.S. entered World War II. The purpose of the campaign was to challenge racism by using the patriotic spirit of the war effort to force Americans to see things from a different perspective. The most successful part of the campaign was that which ultimately desegregated restaurants in two states that had formerly been slave states – Maryland and Delaware. It may seem odd, looking at a map of the U.S. today, to think that these two states, so far north, were considered part of the South prior to the Civil War, but indeed they were – any state that allowed slavery prior to the War was a “southern” state, and so – Maryland and Delaware. Racism was still strong in these states, stronger than in neighboring states like New Jersey, but far less intense than in Mississippi and Alabama, and other states of the Deep South. The NAACP knew that to challenge racism in the way they intended was sure to invite not just criticism, but anger and perhaps even violence, but they also knew that any sort of resistance to be faced would be much easier to weather in the Upper South, as opposed to the Deep South, where lynchings were still commonplace.

In the Maryland and Delaware, white restaurants served African Americans, but only on to-go orders, and after ordering, blacks had to wait outside while their food was prepared.

was gambling on the assumption that the majority of whites in these states would reject discrimination in restaurant service if only their better nature could be appealed to in the right way. So they began to picket lunch counters, small restaurants, generally without tables, seating as few as 15-20 people, or as many as 50-60, generally speaking, that did almost of their business between the hours of 11 AM and 2 PM. Some were open for breakfast, but almost all closed by 2-3 in the afternoon. To have their lunch business disrupted was a ruinous prospect that no business could tolerate for long if it hoped to STAY in business. So the NAACP picketers arrived (and I apologize for not having any

pictures of them specifically, but as of yet I have not been able to locate any) a little before 11 in the morning, armed with signs that said WOULD YOU BUY A HAMBURGER FROM HITLER? or MUSSOLINI MAKES BETTER MALTS THAN MEL (Mel’s Diner?) or how ‘bout

TAKE YOUR BREAK AT TOJO’S LUNCH COUNTER! The idea of a “Double ‘V’ for Victory” was this – World War II was a war against, among other things, racism – it may not have been stated as such by the government, but all of the fascist powers had a racist ideology that helped to support it, and if the United States and her allies were fighting to defeat fascism, then they were also fighting to defeat racism. So one ‘V’

was for victory abroad against the foreign enemies, and the other ‘V’ was for victory at home against the enemy within – the racist attitudes, institutions, and ideology. The picketers were saying to everyone that arrived for lunch at these restaurants: Hey, if you eat here, if you give this man your business, if you support this restaurant and its policies – why then, you might as well be supporting the bad guys that our boys are fighting overseas right this very minute. And if so, then does that say about YOU? They forced the patrons of these

eating establishments to look within themselves, and to determine if they liked what they found there. And because it had been nearly one hundred years since the Civil War, and because over that time period and in spite of the survival of many racist and prejudicial attitudes, the people of the states of the Upper South had become more like their northern neighbors and less like the states of the Deep South…the campaign succeeded. The restaurants of Maryland and Delaware, slowly but surely, faster in the cities, more slowly in the towns and rural areas, desgregated. It was bad for business when blacks stopped buying your take-out food, but it was disastrous when an awful lot of your white clientele started eating elsewhere. It also helped that the NAACP picketers were well-dressed and polite, rather than demonstrably angry and confrontational – as Cesar Chavez so correctly observed twenty years later, the easiest way to convince people to see things your way is to do so with friendliness, not hostility. And the most valuable lesson to come out of this for the NAACP was that if they worked together in large numbers to challenge the legitimacy of some aspect of the system – they could force the system to change. This insight would be of enormous importance in the years to come.

African Americans and World War IIAll American soldiers served together, ate together, showered together, fought together, sweated, bled and died together – except for African Americans, who served in their own segregated units. It might seem strange that they were the only segregated soldiers, when Native/Asian/Latino Americans, who suffered from discrimination in the United States as did blacks, were not. The reason forthis has to do with the fact that the majority of soldiers in the U.S. Army were from the South, and as a group, harbored particularlyhostile feelings regarding associating too closely with blacks – to be sure, not all Southerners felt this way, but many did, even demanding, when injured, to be reassured as to the fact that any blood given to them by transfusion would come from white men, such was their horror over the prospect of becoming “____ % BLACK.” When World War I began for the United States, it became clear quickly that there would not be enough men volunteeering to fill the ranks, so the government decided that all men between the ages of 21-31 would be required by law to sign up for conscription; it was also

decided at this time to allow blacks to enlist. This resulted in the creation of the 369th Infantry Regiment, which came to be known as the “Harlem Hellfighters,” a name that derived from their terrific record of success on the battlefield (the unit was never forced to retreat, nor were any of their number ever captured by the enemy – or to be more

accurate, two of their number were captured, but were soon liberated by their fellow soldiers). They were also known as the “Black Rattlers” and the hommes de bronze, or “men of bronze” by the French.

The reason behind blacks’ enlisting in large numbers in both World Wars was the hope that

their show of bravery and patriotism would help, by example, to combat racism in the U.S.This gamble did not pay off after World War I, when returning servicemen were faced with race riots and the re-emergence of the Ku Klux Klan, but within a very few years of World War II, they would begin to see the reward for their show of patriotism.

One of the essential tasks performed by black soldiers (75% of the drivers were black) was to drive supply trucks from established positions to the front lines of the fighting – fuel,

weapons, parts, ammunition, food, medical supplies – all of it was transported on the Red Ball Express. Between August and November of 1944 alone, during the push to drive the German forces back into Germany, a fleet of 5,958 trucks transported 412,000 tons of supplies, which included 10 million gallons of gasoline. This was an incredibly high-risk

assignment, as the enemy made a special point of targeting supply lines when possible, and the private logic of the U.S. military command was even if only 10% of the drivers made it through on any given run, it would still be worth the sacrifice. These drivers, and black soldiers serving in other areas of the war effort, including the worst of the fighting, may not have received a hero’s welcome from the general public once the war was over, but their efforts did not escape the notice of the president of the United States, Harry

Truman who, in late 1946, created The President’s Committee on Civil Rights, whose task was to investigate the abuse of the civil rights of non-Whites nation-wide, and then make recommendat- ations as to how things might be improved. (To the left, a Red Ball Express truck in a German military museum! On the side you can see the names and unit IDs of soldiers who drove, repaired, or loaded the truck.)

A brief time-out: This picture is too wonderful NOT to share, right?

Desegregating the Armed ForcesAbout six months later, the committee issued their report, entitled “To Secure These Rights.” In it, they suggested that the government should set up a standing Civil Rights Commission, a Congressional Committee on Civil Rights, as well as a permanent fair employment practices commission, and that the Justice Dept should create within it a civil rights division. They also recommended that the federal government enact anti-lynching legislation and bring an end to the poll tax. All of this would obviously take some time. But Truman wanted to take some action immediately to show his commitment to the report. Asa Philip Randolph and other black activists had been talking to the President about desegregating the military, and Truman, who had been mulling this over himself (he had served in World War I) saw the strength in the timing aware, as he was, that black servicemen had been a great source of strength for the United States in World War II. He also knew that such a decision was something that should rightly pass through Congress, but he also saw quite rightly that that would not come to pass anytime soon. For Congress to desegregate the armed forces first the House, then the Senate, would have to pass the measure. Truman knew that every Southern vote, and enough from other conservative states, would be cast against it – and it would go nowhere.

And because of this, he decided to take matters into his own hands, and issued Executive Order 9981, which abolished racial discrimination in the United States military. In signing it (below) Truman quoted Victor Hugo: “There is nothing so powerful as an idea whose time has come.”Many Southern Democrats agreed wholeheartedly, except that they had a different idea, which was to leave the Democrats behind and form their own party, the State’s Rights Democratic Party, or as they were more commonly known, the Dixiecrats Their platform, in part, is spelled out on the following page:

“We stand for the segregation of the races and the racial integrity of each race; the constitutional right to choose one's associates; to accept private employment without governmental interference, and to earn one's living in any lawful way. We oppose the elimination of segregation, the repeal of miscegenation statutes, the control of private employment by Federal bureaucrats called for by the misnamed civil rights program. We favor home-rule, local self-government and a minimum interference with individual rights.”

So maybe just call them the ‘hillbilly party’ and leave it at that, right?

Two last, interesting items: the Secretary of the Army held a press conference not long after Truman’s action, and announced that the President was mistaken in his decision, and that his mistake would surely be rectified soon, and etc. Not a well-advised move – Truman fired him. Also, many people wondered if it could work – would white soldiers, especially Southerners, eat, shower, bunk, with black soldiers? Quite often, when this topic would come up in conversation, the answer would come back: “Look at Jackie Robinson and the Brooklyn Dodgers!” The implication being, baseball is a GAME, and the military is about WAR, about life and death, serious stuff – they’re going to figure it out. And that’s what they did – the integration of the military moved forward with almost no trouble whatsoever.

Desegregating the National Past-time: Baseball, Brooklyn, Branch Rickey, and Jackie Robinson

In the modern world of many, many (too many!) cable channels, one can always find sports to watch, nearly any sport you want at any time of the day or night, or if nothing else, news and talk about sports. But get into Sherman and Mr. Peabody’s Wayback Machine with me – SWOOSH! – and let’s travel back to a time when there were only about 45,000 television sets nationwide, to a time when the country and the spread of information was defined by the radio, the movies with their pre-show newsreels, and print media, primarily the newspapers – that time was the 1940s. At that time there were only three sports of truly national scope and fascination – the sports fan reading this has immediately come up with the answer in his or her mind. The freebie is easy, as it’s in the title above – duh, baseball, sure. Now, the other two…commit yourself to two guesses, and then continue on to the next slide.

NO, not football. Football never became a truly national phenomenon until they put it on TV in the early 1960s. NO, not basketball – only founded in

1946, the NBA would not become a thing of national interest until the mid-1960s. Now you’re scratching your head – NO, not soccer! SOCCER?! Really? That’s barely a national sport now, and it

ain’t hockey -- that’s for Canadians. This is the US of A, friends.

Now you’re thinking harder. Some of you could care less, but the sports geeks are THINKING. And look, don’t waste my time with golf, bowling, track and

field…skiing, skateboarding, surfing…NO! These are not sports.

You heard me.

Not. Sports. Now you just think I’m a jerk, but ask yourself this: what IS a sport? DEFINE “sport.” Tricky, huh? Think like Socrates, boil it down to its essentials, and here

is what you should get: a sport is an athletic competition wherein one must play both offense and defense in order to win. Golf, bowling, etc –

they ARE athletic competitions, sure thing, and I’m not putting down anyone who engages in those

activities, but they are NOT sports –

they are games and competitive activities that require strength, hand-eye coordination, athletic ability…but they are NOT sports. I don’t care if Sports Center covers them, or Sports Illustrated – it’s not my fault if they don’t define their terms.

Volleyball’s a sport – offense AND defense. So is wrestling. And tennis. And a lot of other things.

So, back to the main point – what are the other two sports that Americans, north, south, east, and west followed, cared about, in the late 1940s?

Are you ready? Is the suspense killing you?

DON’T TOUCH THAT MOUSE YET!

(OK, go ahead)

Horse racing and heavyweight boxing. Yup, true story. Those are the other two. Some of you guessed boxing, I betcha, but few if any of you got horse racing.

And I know good and well some of you are disagreeing with my “sports/not sports” argument, right? But boxing? The essence of boxing is offense and defense, that’s ALL it is.

But, I hear you: Come on Dave, HORSE RACING?! Yes, horse racing. Offense? Sure, you’re trying to get around that track faster than the other guy. Defense? Sure, if you have ever seen the ponies run, you know that part of the strategy of a good rider is to try and edge the other jockeys out of position in the turns (more offense!), and when that is employed against you, then you have to ride defensively to

prevent being pushed out of position. So, yeah – SPORT. In fact, it’s historically referred to as “the sport of kings.”

And if you still don’t believe me, read the book or watch the movie Seabiscuit – you’ll be convinced.

But while boxing was big, and so was horse racing, the most popular sport by far, by a country mile, was baseball, so let’s turn to that now…

A few years ago the movie 42 did a very good job of showing most of the ‘how’ and some of the ‘why’ behind Jackie Robinson’s joining the Brooklyn Dodgers. But the filmmakers were at the mercy of the 2-hour feature film format, and they could only show/tell so much. Happily, you have me to give you just a little bit more pertinent information regarding this topic. And how it fits into the overall history of the civil rights movement.

Branch Rickey had been the General Manager of the St. Louis Cardinals from 1919 through 1942, and in the late 30s he gave a lot of thought to integrating his team. But Missouri had been a slave state, and while it may not have been as racist as Mississippi or South Carolina, it was also not quiteso progressive as Maryland and Delaware, and it carried the old smell of slavery in many ways, and Jim Crow was strong there. So Rickey set aside his notions of how to improve the game he loved so much, and bided his time. Rickey was hired away from the Cardinals by the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1942, and it was here that he realized his chance had come. New York City was a far more cosmopolitan and tolerant place than St. Louis, and Rickey believed that his ideas could take wing there. It’s important to note that Rickey’s desire to bring black ballplayers into the big leagues was not because he was a “civil rights activist,” but because he had been angered over the treatment of black players when he was a manager of college baseball, because he was a Christian, because he knew the game would be improved by the introduction of some of the many excellent ballplayers in the Negro

Leagues, and because he knew that the latter improvement would result in a great deal of profit for baseball. Make no mistake about it, Branch Rickey was in this to make money for his club.In 1944 Rickey sent his scouts out to look for the right kind of black ball- player. He had a very specific sort of man in mind, and gave the scouts a list of criteria from which to assess the measure of each player they thought might fit the bill.Rickey wanted this ballplayer to be a five tool player (non-baseball geeks, look that up if you like); to excel at the mental aspects of the game; to be a great athlete; to be a college man and a veteran. He was also looking for a player who had grown up with and played against Whites, and was handsome, in addition to being a “fine gentleman” – luckily for him, Jackie Robinson had it all.Rickey signed Robinson to a contract in 1945, and after some time in the minor leagues, the color barrier was broken in 1947 when Robinson started the season with the National League’s Brooklyn Dodgers.

Larry Doby was signed to the Cleveland Indians, thus being the first Black player in the American League. But Cleveland was not New York City, and Robinson was first, so Doby’s arrival around the same time is often forgotten. To say that Jackie Robinson’s first season was a trial by fire is to say too little. The film 42, again, does a terrific job of showing the racist vitriol that was spewed at him during every game, and the death threats that were received by Robinson at home and by the Dodgers management. But it does not mention the threat to kidnap his infant son, nor the fact that there were men prevented from bringing concealedfirearms into nearly every game – sowould they have taken a shot at him? It seems unlikely, but who knows?

That he played as well as he did that first season (winning Rookie of the Year), under such excruciating pressure, going up to bat, never knowing if he might have a rock or a brick thrown at him, or worse, if he might be shot…that he was one of the best players in the league, in spite of all that pressure…how many could manage such a feat?

Well, let me just say this: in the year 2000, in its last issue of the 20th century, Sports Illustrated ran a story on the greatest athlete of the last 100 years. There were many worthy candidates, and finishing near the top of the list were Bill Russell, Jim Thorpe, Michael Jordan, and Jackie Robinson. Muhammad Ali was chosen as #1, but in my opinion, they got it wrong. Not to slight The Greatest, but he did not have to do what he did under the sort of conditions that Jackie Robinson did – and for my money, performance, or (as the cartoon says, by way of a line from Ernest Hemingway) grace, under pressure? That’s when greatness is truly measured.

BROWN vs BOARD of EDUCATION, TOPEKA, KANSAS

First, some background: Oliver Brown was a working man, a welder (and an assistant pastor at his church), no political activist, certainly not a radical, but he resented the fact that he and his family lived seven blocks from a new white school, and his daughter had to take the bus twenty-one blocks to a black school. It’s also worth noting that Brown, and the thirteen other parents named as plaintiffs in the suit on behalf of their twenty children were all recruited by the NAACP (who engaged their legal counsel), to stand up to the segregation law. Brown was named as the lead plaintiff because it was deemed best as a legal strategy to have a man at the head of the roster in order to make a favorable impression with the justices of the Supreme Court because, as the NAACP anticipated defeat in the courts of Kansas, they were thinking about their long distance prospects in Washington from the start.

True to prediction, the case was lost in Kansas on the grounds of “separate but equal,” as enshrined in the 1896 Supreme Court decision Plessy v. Ferguson. The case was brought before the Supreme Court in combination with four other cases originating in Delaware, South Carolina, Virginia, and Washington, D.C., and argued by the chief counsel for the NAACP, Thurgood Marshall. Interestingly, and something not often discussed, President Truman’s Justice Department filed a ‘friend of the court’ brief in the case which focused almost exclusively upon the foreign policy aspects of the civil rights struggles of blacks in the United States. This bears some discussion.

In 1950 UNESCO (The United Nation’s Educational, Scientific, Cultural Organization) had published a paper signed by an array of scholars from around the globe that a) morally condemned racism, and b) dismissed any scientific attempts to justify racism. The United States at this time was locked in a struggle for influence and power with the Soviet Union – some of the most important proving grounds in this struggle were the recently- and soon-to-be-liberated colonies of the European powers, most of which were in Africa, and all of which were in parts of the world populated by people with dark skin. American diplomats and goodwill ambassadors were finding it difficult to argue for the superiority of the “American Way” when photographs, newsreels, and reports of the abuse and lynchings of blacks and their civil rights struggles were being gleefully held up for mockery by Russian leaders and spread worldwide through the means of modern mass communication. As Justice Earl Warren said in a 1954 speech to the American Bar Association, "Our American system like all others is on trial both at home and abroad, ... the extent to which we maintain the spirit of our constitution with its Bill of Rights, will in the long run do more to make it both secure and the object of adulation than the number of hydrogen bombs we stockpile."

Justice Felix Frankfurter

The case was heard by the Court in the spring, and again in the winter of 1953 – it was difficult to reach a consensus. The various justices had many concerns, among them: was it the Court’s place to do what Congress had NOT done, namely, overturn segregation? Should this not be left to the individual states? Some felt cultural assimilation was incomplete on the part of blacks. One argued that for more than half a century the states had been led to believe that segregation was OK, and that it was unfair to now reverse policy on them. There was concern over how to enforce it, and

whether such a decision might not lead to widespread armed conflict. But there was also concern over recent scientific studies, such as that undertaken by the educational psychologists Kenneth and Mamie Clark. Their doll-test studies had made it very clear to most of the justices that segregation had a deleterious effect on the mental abilities of black schoolchildren.

Ultimately, the justice’s discussions made it clear that the Court was going to come down 5-4 in favor of Brown, but the feeling of Felix Frankfurter was that a unanimous decision had to be made, because anything less would allow segregationists to forever seize on the fact that SOME justices had voted AGAINST desegregation and use that as a rallying point for racist agitprop. From Frankfurter’s point of view, of the four justices voting against Brown, two seemed easily swayed, but of the other two, one was the Chief Justice, Fred Vinson, who was not a racist but was deeply conflicted over judicial activism and so committed to a ‘no’ vote, and Justice Stanley Reed was going to go along with Vinson as a Southerner and a segregationist; Vinson’s mind could not be changed, and neither could his. It appeared that a unanimous decision was an impossibility. And then, the impossible happened: Fred Vinson dropped dead of a heart attack in September, and Felix Frankfurter was quoted as saying: “This is the first indication I have ever had that there is a God.”

Now it was up to President Eisenhower to determine who the next Chief Justice would be, and his choice was Earl Warren, who was nearly done with his term as governor of California. Warren had served in World War I, been an attorney, state attorney, and then governor, and was known to be honest and incorruptible. The only thing that could be said against him was that he had been exceedingly supportive of the federal government’s policy of interning the Japanese-American population of California during World War II, although, one could say in his defense that he lived to see the error in this policy, as he spoke out in regret of it later in life. Eisenhower believed that Warren, like himself, was an essentially conservative moderate, but he was destined to be proven wrong. Dead wrong.

Warren knew that the only way to address Brown v. Board was to confront Plessy v. Ferguson directly. That decision, and it’s enshrinement of ”separate but equal” as the foundation of segregationist policies in the United States, could only make sense if the Court accepted black inferiority. While he agreed that the Court had to be wary of “legislating from the bench,” he did not want to allow the continuing punishment of black children by having them attend inferior schools. As he said to Frankfurter one day in words that the justice wrote down later, “The law cannot in this day and age set them apart.” But how to do what needed to be done with as little turmoil as possible? As Justice Tom Clark put it: “We don’t have money at the Court for an army, we can’t take ads in the newspapers, and we don’t want to go

out on a picket line in our robes. We have to convince the nation by force of our opinions.” Warren, like Frankfurter, knew they had to have a unanimous decision, and sharply framed their discussion in language that made anyone in opposition appear to be a racist. Stanley Reed held out as the lone dissenter, the straw vote going 8-1, for four months, before finally giving in to Warren’s ceaseless persuasion through endless lunchtime conversations whose themes recurrently ran along the lines of, “”Stan, you’re all by yourself in this now, and you’ve got to decide the best thing for the country.” Reed’s only condition was that the process of desegregation be gradual, not swift, so that the White Southerners feel less “punished” by the decision.

The Brown decision was perhaps the single most important occurrence of the decade in America, because it not only legally ended segregation but made it clear that segregationist actions had no moral legitimacy. It enlarged the concept of freedom and shifted the Court in the direction of being more favorable towards the granting of rights to minority groups who had previously been discriminated against. And because of Brown, local, state, and national newsmen felt entitled to actively pursue stories of racism and discrimination – this was also something new under the sun. It’s worth noting that not every-One agreed with the Court’s decision – surprised? Just to give one example, in Virginia, Harry Byrd organized the “Massive Resistance” movement, which shut down public schools in 1958 and 1959 (!!!) but state and federal courts declared all of this nonsense unconstitutional, as indeed it was, and the schools were re-opened. Other Southern states carried out similarly lame-brained responses. In 1963, a full decade later, civil rights activist Medgar Evers sued to desegregate the schools in Jackson, Mississippi (because enforcement of Brown had proven tricky during that first decade after the Court’s decision) and was shot down for his audacity.

In 1955 the Court heard arguments from schools ordered to desegregate that they needed more time to take care of the situation, and the Court gave the responsibility of overseeing the process to federal district courts, ordering that desegregation be carried out “with all deliberate speed.” Many were dismayed by this move, and felt that it gave segregationists legal justification to resist and delay legitimate desegregation for years utilizing a variety of clever tactics – shutting down school systems, allowing some blacks into white schools, and establishing segregated private schools for privileged white children in advance of full segregation.

And while this is all true, and sometimes the wheels of change and justice do turn slowly – ultimately, Brown did what it was supposed to do, the nation was better for it, and, in the words of Abraham Lincoln in his Second Inaugural Address, “as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said "the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether."

On an interesting side note – Earl Warren had a driver when he was governor, Edgar “Pat” Patterson, who had been born and raised in segregated Louisiana, around about the same time Warren was being born and raised in sunny California. They had long, interesting chats on their lengthy drives in to work during the decade Warren was governor and Patterson, and others, later made the point that it was their frank discussions on racial issues that helped Warren to see the issue of race, and civil rights, in the way that he did, and that his shift to a more liberal brand of politics as Chief Justice was also largely to do with the time spent with Patterson. True story? We’ll never know, but it’s sort of like the original Driving Miss Daisy!

ONLY A PAWN IN THEIR GAME, Bob Dylan, 1963

A bullet from the back of a bushTook Medgar Evers' bloodA finger fired the trigger to his nameA handle hid out in the darkA hand set the sparkTwo eyes took the aimBehind a man's brainBut he can't be blamedHe's only a pawn in their game

A South politician preaches to the poor white man"You got more than the blacks, don't complainYou're better than them, you been born with white skin, " they explainAnd the Negro's nameIs used, it is plainFor the politician's gainAs he rises to fameAnd the poor white remainsOn the caboose of the trainBut it ain't him to blameHe's only a pawn in their game

The deputy sheriffs, the soldiers, the governors get paidAnd the marshals and cops get the sameBut the poor white man's used in the hands of them all like a toolHe's taught in his schoolFrom the start by the ruleThat the laws are with himTo protect his white skinTo keep up his hateSo he never thinks straight'Bout the shape that he's inBut it ain't him to blameHe's only a pawn in their game

From the poverty shacks, he looks from the cracks to the tracksAnd the hoofbeats pound in his brainAnd he's taught how to walk in a packShoot in the backWith his fist in a clinchTo hang and to lynchTo hide 'neath the hoodTo kill with no painLike a dog on a chainHe ain't got no nameBut it ain't him to blameHe's only a pawn in their game

Today, Medgar Evers was buried from the bullet he caughtThey lowered him down as a kingBut when the shadowy sun sets on the oneThat fired the gunHe'll see by his graveOn the stone that remainsCarved next to his nameHis epitaph plainOnly a pawn in their game

Reading the lyrics is one thing, but to really get the power of the song, go to youtube and dig Dylan singing it, in the year that he wrote and recorded it, not long after Evers was shot – there’s not many songs like it. Just a man, a guitar, and a harmonica. There’s a reason that Bob won the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Now, what I just did was acquaint you folks with some of the things that were happening just PRIOR and up to what we generally think of as the beginning of the traditional starting point of “THE civil rights movement,” and that’s the Brown decision. I like to go into those things in some detail, not just because I think that they are important, but also because I think that discussions of the civil rights movement in classes dealing with U.S. history tends to start too late (in 1954) and end too early (in 1965), as if nothing was done prior to 1965, and nothing happened after 1865 – it’s a nice, tight decade bookended by those two dates, and historians do like to tidy things up when they can. But the reason I call this lecture ‘The Era for the Movements of Civil Rights, 1941-1973…and Beyond?’ is because I want to stress that it was not ONLY African Americans that had, or were in need of, a civil rights movement. Theirs was first, biggest, and ultimately most successful (to this point), but sometimes our emphasis on THE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT and all of those famous figures and moments...Dr. King...Rosa Parks...Medgar Evers...Emmet Till...the bus boycott...Brown v. Board...the March on Washington, and on Selma...the Freedom Rides…and etc, tends to obscure the fact that there were other groups, and other leaders, other civil rights movements, some of them

still going on today, because clearly, we still haven’t got the country straightened out. That’s the other OTHER point of the title of the lecture -- that ‘...and Beyond?’ at the end of it leaves it open-ended, because I don’t when we are going to have our act together, if ever – I like to think we’ll get there, I like to imagine a U.S. History college class of the year...oh, say, 2137, and in their textbook there’s a chapter entitled: Ch. 14 – The Era of the Movements for Civil Rights, 1941-2052. Or 2076, 2091, 2112. SOME year we’re going to have gotten to a place where we can all “just get along” and treat one another with basic human dignity.

But OK – don’t want to start soapboxing here. Let’s consider for a moment what I said in asserting that the black movement was the biggest and most successful of the various civil rights movements. What are the reasons behind this? First, until the late 20th century, blacks were the second largest racio-ethnic group in the country, after Whites, and in the 1950s and 60s the third largest, Latinos, was not even remotely close in size. So when a large percentage of the African-American population finally got rolling behind the various movements within the civil rights movement (hereafter to be abbreviated as the CRM), you’re talking about a tremendous number of people, not to mention all of the non-black people that also stood up and got involved, marched, demonstrated, etc, to try and square the

record as far as civil rights were concerned. Along with numbers came money – even if the majority of blacks were lower class – if enough lower class folks are donating small amounts of money when and where they can, when you combine that with the contributions of other people of middle and upper class backgrounds, both black and non-black – it comes out to a lot of money, and the movements needed money – money to rent office space, pay for radio time, newspaper advertising, printing leaflets and fliers, paying travel expenses for representatives to travel to meet with state and federal officials, and on and on and on. As civil rights organizations grew, there were people who worked for them full time – they had to be paid. So a big part of the success of the black movement had to do with numbers, and the money that those numbers generated. Puerto Rican Americans had a civil rights movement that started in 1968, the Young Lords – started up in Chicago by Jose “Cha Cha” Jimenez. But because their numbers were small, they were

never able to generate much in the way of funding, and that really hindered their ability to get much done. The numbers in the African-American movement also equaled visibility – it takes a LOT of people to make things happen (see the next slide) if you intend to adhere to peaceful nonviolence, and you need to make things HAPPEN if you want the news organizations to notice you – and if the news didn’t notice you, you and your civil rights movement weren’t going anywhere – remember guys, this is before cell phones, the internet, and things going viral simply as the result of the actions of interested citizens. When you can summon up several hundred thousand people and march on the nation’s capital? THAT gets you noticed. That’s something that the leaders of the country can’t ignore, and that’s a power that at that time was really only held by blacks, as far as the groups that were organizing to fight for their civil rights.

And there were other strengths that came from being able to draw from a larger population base as well. One of them had to do with leadership. What you wanted out of your movement’s leadership was natural intelligence, and hopefully, education. So the kind of people that you, as a black person, might like to see stepping up and lending a hand in, say, Alabama in 1950 would be college-educated professional men – going to be hard enough getting anywhere in the South, best not try and have women running the show – this was still a man’s world, for the most part. In Montgomery, Alabama, in 1950, according to the census, there were appr. 40,000 blacks, and to serve their needs there was one dentist, three doctors, two lawyers, one pharmacist…and ninety-two preachers. NINETY-TWO PREACHERS! Now any of those individuals were probably men who could write, organize a group of people, intelligent,

educated individuals...but there is only one profession there whose job, whose very purpose is to stand up in front of large groups of people and through the power of their rhetoric, rally hearts and minds, and fill their listeners with purpose, lead them in a certain direction, remind them of who they are supposed to be and what they are supposed to stand for – and this is the place where the black movement had it ALL OVER the Puerto Rican, the Native American, the Chicano, the women’s, and the LGBT’s rights movements – because none of those other groups had a built-in cadre of potential charismatic leaders like the African-American community did.

And when you measure success – well look no further than the 24th Amendment to the Constitution...the Civil Rights Act of 1964…the Voting Rights of 1965...and a handful of other civil rights laws passed in the mid-60s that would not have come about, or certainly not so soon, were it not for the black civil rights movement.

But again – this was just the first stage in the “era of the movements for civil rights,” or if you will, the trunk of the civil rights tree. Because out of the black movement branched the Puerto Rican movement, the Young Lords and A.I.M., the American Indian Movement. The women’s rights movement, while dating back to the late 1830s and really crystallizing in 1848 at the Seneca Falls Convention, had proceeded in fits and starts, winning perhaps its greatest victory at the apotheosis of the Progressive Movement in 1920 when the 19th Amendment to the Constitution was ratified and women won the right to vote, but the women’s rights movement was given new legs in many ways as a result of the example of the concessions won in the African American civil rights struggles. The gay liberation movement, starting in the late 1960s or early 1970s (depending on which historian you subscribe to), evolved into what is now referred to as

the LGBT social movement, and it is clearly the civil rights movement that is most at the forefront of national discourse today. Lastly, the Chicano movement, with its many strains – Jose Angele Gutierrez and La Raza Unida Party in Texas; reies Lopez Tijerina and the Alianza in New Mexico; Corky Gonzales and La Crusada por la Justicia in Colorado; the Brown Berets and the high-school “blowouts” in L.A.; and of course, Cesar Chavez, Dolores Huerta, and the United Farmworkers in Delano, California – it’s hardly credible to posit the existence of these movements, let alone any successes they enjoyed, without the example of the black movements that came first. So in the next lecture, the focus will be on the backdrop to, and the circumstances of, the Chicano Movement, but before we head off that way, there are a few more images and information for you to drink in in the slides that follow.

Rosa Parks being fingerprinted by a police officer, and on the right, African American participants in the Montgomery bus boycott that resulted from

her arrest.

Some of the Freedom Riders and, in the following image, a map of their movements through the South

Martin Luther King, Jr., Birmingham jail, April 1963. It was during this incarceration that he produced one of the finest pieces of writing in the history

of the country, “Letter from a Birmingham Jail.” (Excerpt following)

We have waited for more than 340 years for our constitutional and God given rights. The nations of Asia and Africa are moving with jetlike speed toward gaining political independence, but we still creep at horse and buggy pace toward gaining a cup of coffee at a lunch counter. Perhaps it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging darts of segregation to say, "Wait." But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim; when you have seen hate filled policemen curse, kick and even kill your black brothers and sisters; when you see the vast majority of your twenty million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society; when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six year old daughter why she can't go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see tears welling up in her eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children, and see ominous clouds of inferiority beginning to form in her little mental sky, and see her beginning to distort her personality by developing an unconscious bitterness toward white people; when you have to concoct an answer for a five year old son who is asking: "Daddy, why do white people treat colored people so mean?"; when you take a cross county drive and find it necessary to sleep night after night in the uncomfortable corners of your automobile because no motel will accept you; when you are humiliated day in & day out by nagging signs reading "white" and "colored"; when when your first name becomes "nigger," your middle name becomes "boy" (however old you are) and your last name becomes "John," and your wife and mother are never given the respected title "Mrs."; when you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro, living constantly at tiptoe stance, never quite knowing what to expect next, and are plagued with inner fears and outer resentments; when you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of "nobodiness"--then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait.

There comes a time when the cup of endurance runs over, and men are no longer willing to be plunged into the abyss of despair. I hope, sirs, you can understand our legitimate and unavoidable impatience. You express a great deal of anxiety over our willingness to break laws. This is certainly a legitimate concern. Since we so diligently urge people to obey the Supreme Court's decision of 1954 outlawing segregation in the public schools, at first glance it may seem rather paradoxical for us consciously to break laws. One may well ask: "How can you advocate breaking some laws and obeying others?" The answer lies in the fact that there are two types of laws: just and unjust. I would be the first to advocate obeying just laws. One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws.

Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. I would agree with St. Augustine that "an unjust law is no law at all."

March on Washington, August 28, 1963

Dr. King and other civil rights leaders meet with President Johnson, 1964

Selma to Montgomery March, Alabama, 1965

Black Panther Party March, Oakland, CA 1967

Black Panther PropagandaPosters, 1967

Members of A.I.M., the American Indian Movement, 1969

Members of A.I.M. in possession of Alcatraz Island, 1969

Marchers for the National Organization for Women (NOW), 1969

Totally scary hillbilly racists…nuff said.

Norman Rockwell and Civil Rights

Rockwell was America’s most beloved artist, having done over 300 covers for the Saturday Evening Post, America’s most beloved magazine, over the course of 47 years. He had first dipped his brush into the well of civil rights by doing the ‘Four Freedoms’ paintings at the request of the federal government during World War II, and not long after that, had been written by Roderick Stevens, the African-American head of the Bronx Interracial Conference. Stevens had made the point to Rockwell that blacks still suffered from ‘Want’ and ‘Fear’ – these were two of the ‘Freedoms’ that were denied to too many of them, and urged Rockwell to do a series on race relations that could be printed as posters, just as the ‘Four Freedoms’ paintings had been, showing black contributions to American success and freedom. Rockwell replied to Stevens, but because of the restrictions placed upon him by the editorial staff of the Post, was unable to engage in this endeavor. Rockwell explained in a 1971 interview: “George Horace Lorimer [the Post’s editor], who was a very liberal man, told me never to show colored people except as servants.” (see next slide)

Here in Boy in Dining Car and The Homecoming the Post’s policy is crystal clear – the porter, smiling benignly down on the small boy reading the morning paper, and the repairman, as happy as all of the family and neighbors to see the young man home from the war. Rockwell would be unable to break these constraints until the civil rights movement was well underway, and then in 1960 he returned to an abandoned project of the late 1940s when, after the founding of the United Nations, he had made preliminary sketches for a painting that would act as a tribute to what he believed the potential of the U.N. to be – an organization that could solve some of the world’s many problems. But various issues conspired to discourage his efforts at the time, including his inability to get the delegates of the U.N. to sit for portrait work for any length of time.

When he brought the project back to life in 1961 he entitled it The Golden Rule and had the maxim emblazoned in gold directly onto the painting. Art historians have commented on the fact that none of Rockwell’s previous servile non-whites are to be seen here and, as Jack Doyle has pointed out, it was as if Rockwell were integrating the Post’s covers on his own.

In 1960, when the court-ordered desegregation of several schools in New Orleans were set to begin, white parents kept their kids out of school. At William Frantz Elementary School two children had been kept in by their parents – these families were harassed by their fellow citizens every bit as hard as Ruby Bridges was, the lone black child to attend that school on day one. When she and her mother arrived, escorted by four federal marshals, they were greeted by signs that read “All I Want For Christmas is a Clean White School” and “Save Segregation, Vote States Rights Pledged Electors,” not to mention chants of “Two, Four, Six, Eight, we don’t want to integrate…”

The Problem We All Live With, 1963

Rockwell’s painting of Ruby Bridges on her way to school.

Above: Ruby Bridges with President Obama at the White House, 2011

The appearance of the painting The Problem We All Live With as a kind of “centerfold” in Look magazine (Rockwell had left the Post behind that same year) took Americans by surprise – many loved it, but many were angered by it – all were shocked, precisely because Rockwell had been so belovedly apolitical for so many decades. But, as he said: “For 47 years, I portrayed the best of all possible worlds – grandfathers, puppy dogs – things like that. That kind of stuff is dead now, and I think it’s about time.”

And Rockwell was not done. His next painting in the same vein was executed in 1964 and focused on the murder of three young civil rights workers who were helping to

register black voters in Mississippi. (The film Mississippi Burning covers this historical event – a deeply flawed film, but worth seeing for a variety of reasons.) The work was entitled Southern Justice (below).

Negro In the Suburbs, 1967

Rockwell did several more paintings for Look on the topic of race relations. Negro In the Suburbs was part of an entire issue devoted to suburban life, its pros and cons, and accompanied an article wherein a black woman, suburban wife and mother, stated that “Being a Negro in the middle of white people is like being alone in the middle of a crowd.” Rockwell makes his point by making his two groups of children the same – boys ready for baseball, pets in tow, girls with hair ribbons, everyone curious – in all regards save for the color of their skin. The last of these paintings, while not strictly on race relations, is entitled The Right To Know, and seemingly concerns the issue of increasing numbers of Americans, from all races and walks of life, looking directly to their government and expecting answers to the difficult questions

confronting the American people. As such, perhaps more than any of these works, it seems to sum up the tenor of the times, as the citizens of the United States increasingly strove to make sense of the ways that the country was changing, and how those changes would affect them, their children, and their children’s children.

The Right To Know, 1968

I am indebted to the work of Jack Doyle in this information of Rockwell and his intersection with the civil rights movement.

This story made a lot of internet noise when it went viral in early March, 2017. This little white squirt, Jax Rosebush, age four, asked if he could shave his head so that the teacher could not tell him and his best pal, Reddy Weddon, apart. According to the Facebook post from Jax’s mother that brought this story to the world’s attention, 'The only difference Jax sees in the two of them is their hair.' It’s also worth noting that Reddy and his older brother were adopted by a local pastor and his wife from the Democratic republic of Congo in 2014. I was reminded of these two when I stumbled across this line of Ruby Bridges: “None of us knows anything about disliking one another when we come into the world. It is something that is passed on to us.” Happily, not here, and it’s stories like this that gives one hope for the future.

BEFORE HAIRCUT AFTER HAIRCUT

You may find this of interest – read on if you like. Totally optional.

On June 29, 1947, President Harry Truman spoke to 10,000 members of the NAACP at their 38th Annual Convention from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, the first president ever to address the NAACP, period, let alone at so symbolically important a location.

He declared in this nationally broadcast radio address that the federal government had to take the lead in guaranteeing the civil rights of all American citizens. Later that year the President’s Committee on Civil Rights released its report, To Secure These Rights. Among their recommendations were an anti-lynching law (effectively making this form of murder a federal crime), the abolition of the poll tax, a permanent Fair Employment Practices Committee (FEPC), the desegregation of the military, and laws to enforce fair housing, education, health care, and employment.

One can only hope for a future president bold enough to make a speech of similar import, because as far as we’ve come, we still have a ways to go.