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History > 20th century > USA > Civil rights
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President Lyndon B. Johnson (L) meets with Martin Luther King, Jr. (R) in the White House Cabinet Room
Date: 03/18/1966
Source: Lyndon Baines Johnson Library and Museum. Image Serial Number: A2134-2A. http://photolab.lbjlib.utexas.edu/detail.asp?id=18256 - broken link Author: Yoichi R. Okamoto
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Luther_King_Jr.
William Alfred Wright / Bill Wright 1936-2021
first Black competitor to win a United States Golf Association event in an era when African-Americans were not welcome either in segregated country clubs or in the top amateur and professional ranks,
(...)
Wright was attending the Western Washington College of Education (now Western Washington University) in 1959 when he won the U.S.G.A. Amateur Public Links Championship in Denver.
After barely qualifying for match play, he had little troublein the tournament.
His skill on the greens led The Spokesman-Review of Spokane to call him a “slender putting wizard.”
Wright’s immediate reaction to being the first Black golfer to win a national championship was to hang up the phone on the reporter who had asked how that felt.
“I wasn’t mad,” he said in an interview with the U.S.G.A. in 2009.
“I wanted to be Black. I wanted to be the winner. I wanted to be all those things.”
But he was struck by how quickly his victory was viewed as one for his race.
As he saw it, he said, “I was just playing golf.”
Wright’s victory was a singular moment for Black golfers at a time when the P.G.A. of America’s bylaws still had a “Caucasians-only” clause (which would be abolished in 1961).
A Black man did not win a PGA Tour event until 1964, when Pete Brown finished first at the Waco Turner Open in Texas.
The next two African-American winners of U.S.G.A. tournaments were Alton Duhon (the 1982 U.S. Senior Amateur) and Tiger Woods (the 1991 to 1993 U.S. Junior Amateurs).
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/25/
Edgar Ray Killen 1925-2017
former Klansman who was sentenced to a 60-year prison term in 2005 for arranging the murders of three young civil rights workers outside Philadelphia, Miss., in 1964 during the Freedom Summer drive to register Southern black voters
(...)
Mr. Killen was convicted of state manslaughter charges 41 years to the day after James Earl Chaney, 21, a black man from Meridian, Miss., and two white New Yorkers, Andrew Goodman, 20, and Michael Schwerner, 24, disappeared in a death trap set by a local deputy sheriff and a gang of his fellow Ku Klux Klansmen.
He was prosecuted in one of the South’s major “atonement” trials, in which the Mississippi authorities revisited civil rights-era atrocities.
He was convicted of a crime that galvanized the civil rights movement, stamped the town of Philadelphia as an outpost of terror and inspired the 1988 Hollywood movie “Mississippi Burning,”
Mr. Killen was a founding member of the Klan in the Philadelphia area and its chief recruiter, according to the F.B.I.
He had been among 18 men tried in 1967 on federal charges of conspiring to violate the civil rights of Mr. Chaney, Mr. Goodman and Mr. Schwerner.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/12/
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/12/
https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2018/01/12/
2005
40 years on, Mississippi Burning case finally reaches trial
Forty years after three civil rights workers were killed on a dirt road in Mississippi on a night that came to symbolise the racial hate of the American south, an elderly leader of the Ku Klux Klan appeared in court yesterday to be formally charged with their murder.
In proceedings interrupted by a bomb threat, Edgar Ray Killen, appeared handcuffed and in an orange prison jump suit to plead not guilty to three counts of murder.
(...)
Killen was a preacher and a local Klan leader in Neshoba County, Mississippi when the killings took place in 1964.
The FBI identified him as the ringleader of the gang that ran the three civil rights workers off of a lonely road, killed them, and hid their corpses in an earthen dam.
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2005/jan/08/usa.
https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2018/01/12/
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/29/us/
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/22/us/
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2005/jan/08/
Kenneth Clark 1914-2005
US psychologist whose work helped end school segregation
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2005/may/06/
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2005/may/06/
1979
Greensboro massacre
The Greensboro massacre was a deadly confrontation which occurred on November 3, 1979, in Greensboro, North Carolina, US, when members of the Ku Klux Klan and the American Nazi Party (ANP) shot and killed five participants in a "Death to the Klan" march which was organized by the Communist Workers Party (CWP).
Wikipedia, 16 February 2024
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/15/
Hubert Horatio Humphrey Jr. 1911-1978
In 1948, the Minneapolis mayor and future presidential candidate Hubert Humphrey traveled to Philadelphia and spoke at the Democratic National Convention in support of a strong civil rights plank. Upon his return to the city, 2,000 supporters came to greet him.
Photograph: Wally Kammann Star Tribune via Getty Images
How Hubert Humphrey Tried to Make Minneapolis, and America, Less Racist In “Into the Bright Sunshine,” Samuel G. Freedman makes the case that Humphrey was part of the vanguard in the fight for civil rights. NYT July 13, 2023
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/13/
American pharmacist, politician, and statesman who served as the 38th vice president of the United States from 1965 to 1969.
He twice served in the United States Senate, representing Minnesota from 1949 to 1964 and 1971 to 1978.
As a senator he was a major leader of modern liberalism in the United States.
As President Lyndon B. Johnson's vice president, he supported the controversial Vietnam War.
An intensely divided Democratic Party nominated him in the 1968 presidential election, which he lost to Republican nominee Richard Nixon. - Wikipedia, 14 July 2023 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubert_Humphrey
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/13/
Freedom House 1967-1975
Freedom House ambulance service, widely acknowledged as the first paramedic program in the United States.
https://www.npr.org/2022/09/27/
https://www.npr.org/2022/09/27/
Muhammad Ali, with his arm raised, during a demonstration in 1975 calling for Mr. Carter to be released from prison.
“I was always the guy in the background, the other guy in the case that no one knew or cared about,” Mr. Artis said.
Photograph: Neal Boenzi The New York Times
John Artis, Convicted With Rubin (Hurricane) Carter, Dies at 75 He was the “forgotten man” in the triple murder case that was eventually overturned and that exposed flaws in the criminal justice system. NYT Published Nov. 11, 2021 Updated Nov. 12, 2021 12:04 p.m. ET
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/11/
March 10-12, 1972
National Black Political Convention Gary, Indiana
The writer, 79, was one of the major forces in the Black Arts movement of the 1960s and ’70s.
Above, Mr. Baraka at the National Black Political Convention in 1972.
Photograph:Gary Settle The New York Times
Amiri Baraka, Polarizing Poet and Playwright, Dies at 79 NYT Jan. 9, 2014
https://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/10/
The National Black Political Convention, or the Gary Convention, was held on March 10–12, 1972 in Gary, Indiana https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Black_Political_Convention
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
https://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/10/
Black Arts movement of the 1960s and ’70s (...) sought to duplicate in fiction, poetry, drama and other mediums the aims of the black power movement in the political arena.
https://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/10/
https://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/10/
Solidarity funeral procession of James Earl Green, Jackson, Mississippi, May 1970
Photograph: Doris Derby
‘Now is a continuation of then. We are seeing repeats of what we saw back then, like voter suppression and police brutality. When you make strides, the enemy takes steps to block your achievements’
‘Now is a continuation of then’: America’s civil rights era – in pictures Doris Derby is a documentary photographer, activist and professor who captured the people at the frontline of the struggle for racial equality in 1960s and 1970s America G Thu 28 Oct 2021 07.00 BST
https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/gallery/2021/oct/28/
May 14, 1970
Jackson State Massacre
The police fires into a crowd at the historically black college, killing two.
On Feb. 3, 1964, a white driver slammed into a Jackson State student named Mamie Ballard, sending her to the hospital.
This incident began a yearslong push to close Lynch Street to traffic, which in turn helped propel the already potent local civil rights movement.
Jackson State may have been majority black, but it was in the capital of a state dominated by white supremacists, who governed the college.
Informed by the civil rights and Black Power movements, students naturally saw the fight to close Lynch Street as a cornerstone of their broader push for justice and equality in Mississippi.
With an increasingly aggressive tenor, the ensuing student demonstrations, which peaked each spring, demanded justice for Ms. Ballard, who survived, and that Lynch Street be closed.
On May 14, 1970, someone set fire to a dump truck parked in the middle of Lynch Street a few blocks from campus.
While there was no evidence that student protesters had been involved, white authorities cited the vandalism to justify the use of force.
Late that evening officers from the Jackson Police Department and the Mississippi Highway Patrol marched onto campus, accompanied by the so-called Thompson Tank, an armored personnel carrier that Mayor Allen Thompson, the city’s segregationist mayor, had purchased in 1964, ahead of what he termed the civil rights “invasion” of Freedom Summer.
That same year the Mississippi Legislature gave the Highway Patrol broad authority to intervene in protests, even if local authorities hadn’t requested them.
The patrol still held that power in 1970.
The phalanx of officers proceeded to Alexander Hall, a women’s dormitory, arriving close to midnight.
But instead of facing a mass of angry protesters, they found scores of students enjoying a Thursday evening relaxing outside as graduation neared.
Later asserting that a sniper had shot at them from a window in Alexander Hall — an absurd claim with no evidence — the police fired more than 400 rounds of ammunition over 28 seconds in every direction.
In the chaos that spilled into the early morning hours of May 15, two men, Phillip Lafayette Gibbs and James Earl Green, were left dead;
a dozen other young people were wounded in the gunfire.
Hundreds of others bear physical and psychological scars to this day.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/14/
https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/gallery/2021/oct/28/
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/14/
Henry Dortress "Dickie" Marrow Jr. 1947-1970
A young Black man, Henry "Dickie" Marrow, was brutally murdered outside a local store by the white shop owners who accused him of saying something they didn't like to a white woman.
https://www.npr.org/2022/10/23/
https://www.npr.org/2022/10/23/
May 11-12, 1970
Civil rights riot / uprising
Black power movement
For two days, starting on May 11, 1,000 Black residents rebelled against the city's systemic oppression.
More than 100 blocks of neighborhoods and businesses — about 7 miles — were ransacked and vandalized.
Police killed six Black men.
https://www.npr.org/2020/10/01/
https://www.npr.org/2020/10/01/
1969
decision in Alexander v. Holmes County Board of Education
after years of obstruction by many states through the 1950s and 60s, (it) ordered that racially segregated schools must immediately desegregate.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/02/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/02/
A 1969 fall fashion show at a women’s retailer, Tenenbaum’s of Greenville, in the Mississippi Delta.
Photograph: Doy Gorton
Photographing the White South in the Turbulence of the 1960s Doy Gorton, a son of the Mississippi Delta who joined the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, returned to Mississippi to embark on a project photographing his fellow white Southerners. NYT Sept. 13, 2018
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/13/
Children protest outside the YMCA, Jackson, Mississippi, late 1960s
‘This is about segregation of the different facilities. The black YMCA in Jackson had no swimming pool, and these children were really mad about that, so they took it into their own hands to protest it.
You found a lot of black kids, especially in the cities, couldn’t go swimming.
And many black children died because they didn’t know how to swim.’
Through the lens of civil rights photographer Doris Derby – in pictures The activist, photographer and former academic Doris Derby lived and worked in the southern US at the height of the civil rights era. Her images capture not the protests of the 60s but the everyday realities of black lives at that time. Here she talks us through some of her photographs G Sat 1 Feb 2020 16.00 GMT
https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/gallery/2020/feb/01/
April 11, 1968
President Lyndon Johnson signs the Civil Rights Act of 1968 / Fair Housing Act, prohibiting discrimination in the sale, rental, and financing of housing
https://www.history.com/topics/black-history/ https://www.justice.gov/crt/fair-housing-act-2
https://www.npr.org/2018/04/11/
April 4, 1968
Martin Luther King (1929-1968) is shot dead by
1968 King Assassination Report Video CBS News
Walter Cronkite had almost finished broadcasting the "CBS Evening News" when he received word of Martin Luther King's assassination.
His report detailed the shooting and the nation's reaction to the tragedy. (CBSNews.com)
YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cmOBbxgxKvo
http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/march/10/
http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/april/4/
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/20/
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/24/us/
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/06/
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/mar/30/
http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/april/23/
More than 20 civil rights cases have been successfully prosecuted since 1994, including the 2005 conviction of Edgar Ray Killen, 85, one of the Klansmen responsible for the 1964 deaths of three civil rights workers, - 2010
https://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/24/
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/21/us/mississippi-
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/29/us/
https://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/24/
http://movies.nytimes.com/2010/08/13/
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/22/us/
June 12, 1967
The Supreme Court said no state could prohibit mixed-race marriages because “marriage is one of the ‘basic civil rights of man.’ ”
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/10/
U.S. Supreme Court LOVING v. VIRGINIA, 388 U.S. 1 (1967) 388 U.S. 1 LOVING ET UX. v. VIRGINIA. APPEAL FROM THE SUPREME COURT OF APPEALS OF VIRGINIA. No. 395. Argued April 10, 1967. Decided June 12, 1967.
Virginia's statutory scheme to prevent marriages between persons solely on the basis of racial classifications held to violate the Equal Protection and Due Process Clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment. http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/getcase.pl?court=us&vol=388&invol=1
https://caselaw.findlaw.com/us-supreme-court/388/1.html https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/388/1
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/10/
Sammy Davis Jr. 1925-1990
(born Samuel George Davis, Jr.)
RatPac Press & Running Press (The Perseus Books Group)
Rat Pack's Sammy Davis Jr. Lives On Through Daughter's Stories NPR May 08, 2014 12:57 PM ET
http://www.npr.org/2014/05/08/
In his own words, Sammy Davis, Jr. was "the only black, Puerto Rican, one-eyed, Jewish entertainer in the world."
His daughter, Tracey Davis, shares memories and details of his life in her new book, Sammy Davis Jr.: A Personal Journey with My Father.
It's based on conversations Davis had with her father as he battled throat cancer near the end of his life.
He described his start in vaudeville at 3 years old where he was billed as an adult midget.
"He didn't have the traditional family life," Davis tells NPR's Celeste Headlee.
"He was always working, working, working, and trying to become famous."
She says that even after making it, "he was scared that it could be taken away at any minute."
Sammy Davis Jr. was frank about the racial prejudice that he suffered both during his army service and his time in show business.
It also shadowed his family life.
He married Swede May Britt Wilkens in 1960 — a time when interracial marriage was forbidden by law in 31 states.
They both converted to Judaism.
As his daughter grew up, she remembers "there [were] times that a swastika was painted somewhere or the N-word was written on a car."
http://www.npr.org/2014/05/08/
http://www.npr.org/2014/05/08/
1967
Racial tensions
The small town of Cambridge, Md., went up in flames (...) this summer.
A speech by black activist H. Rap Brown helped incite unrest there.
But the town's problems were rooted in a painful history of racial discrimination.
(...)
In the summer of 1967, the racial tensions that had been simmering for years boiled over in a paroxysm of violence across the country.
While there had been riots in African-American neighborhoods before — most notably in the Watts section of Los Angeles in 1965 — the long, hot summer of 1967 saw fire-bombings, looting and confrontations with police in more than 150 cities and towns, from Hartford to Tampa and Cincinnati to Buffalo.
The worst of the unrest was in Detroit and Newark, N.J. — big cities where African-Americans set fires and looted businesses in their own neighborhoods, traded gunfire with police and otherwise vented their frustration at the slow pace of social change three years after passage of the Civil Rights Act.
Less well-remembered are the many small cities and rural towns that were swept up in the strife, places like Plainfield, N.J., and Cambridge, Md.
Cambridge, 90 miles from the nation's capital, quickly drew the attention of federal authorities at the highest level.
It became a place where small-town life, small-town attitudes and small-town troubles intersected with national politics.
https://www.npr.org/2007/07/29/
https://www.npr.org/2007/07/29/
Race riots engulf Detroit and Milwaukee, in Los Angeles, Newark and Chicago
June 1966
March Against Fear
We Shall Overcome (the James Meredith March Against Fear), June 1966
‘After civil rights activist James Meredith was shot on 6 June 1966 – the second day of his March Against Fear from Memphis, Tennessee, to Jackson, Mississippi – Martin Luther King Jr took up the march and was joined by fellow civil rights leaders John Lewis (left) and Ralph Abernathy (right).
Thousands followed.
As we marched, with helicopters flying overhead, the unwavering King, flanked by Lewis (in light raincoat) and Abernathy, sang We Shall Overcome, which became the anthem of the civil rights movement.’
Photograph: Harry Benson Aperture
Station to station: imaginative works from Magnum's print sale – in pictures From the disappearance of Andy Warhol to the march of Martin Luther King Jr, these ‘works of imagination’ are up for sale for just $100 G Mon 19 Oct 2020 14.00 BST
https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/gallery/2020/oct/19/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
https://www.archives.gov/research/african-americans/black-power/sncc/
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/content/dam/books/pdfs/
https://time.com/4356404/
https://exhibits.stanford.edu/fitch/browse/
https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/gallery/2020/oct/19/
In 1966, Martin Luther King Jr. traveled to Chicago with a mission to expand the Civil Rights Movement from the South to the North.
King led what became known as the Chicago Freedom Movement, focusing on racial discrimination in housing as well as discriminatory practices by employers.
http://www.npr.org/2016/06/14/
https://www.npr.org/2016/06/18/
https://www.npr.org/2016/06/14/
1966
Mr. Artis, left, in doorway, was shackled to Mr. Carter in 1967 as they left a Paterson, N.J., courthouse after their conviction in the killing of three patrons of a tavern.
Photograph: Associated Press
John Artis, Convicted With Rubin (Hurricane) Carter, Dies at 75 He was the “forgotten man” in the triple murder case that was eventually overturned and that exposed flaws in the criminal justice system. NYT Published Nov. 11, 2021 Updated Nov. 12, 2021 12:04 p.m. ET
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/11/
In 1966, Mr. Artis, who was 20, and Mr. Carter, a ranking middleweight boxer who was 29, were pulled over by the police in Paterson, N.J., because Mr. Carter’s white Dodge supposedly resembled the getaway car used hours earlier in the murder of two men and a woman in a local bar.
The victims were white; the suspects were Black.
Because the crime occurred only hours after a Black tavern owner was shot dead by a white man, the authorities theorized that the triple murder was racially motivated.
Mr. Artis and Mr. Carter passed lie detector tests but were convicted by an all-white jury on the testimony of two petty criminals and sentenced to three life terms each.
After the trial, persuaded of the defendants’ innocence, Richard Solomon, a freelance writer, formed a defense committee.
Mr. Hogan, an investigator for the state public defender’s office; Harold G. Levenson, of WNET‐Channel 13; and Selwyn Raab, a reporter for The New York Times, tracked down the two witnesses whose accounts had underpinned the prosecution’s case.
Mr. Raab wrote a series of award-winning articles on the matter.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/11/
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/11/
https://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/21/
https://www.npr.org/2014/04/21/
https://www.nytimes.com/1976/12/22/
1965
https://www.npr.org/2020/07/07/
15 March 1966 / August 11-16, 1965
March 1965
The Negro Family: The Case For National Action, also known as the Moynihan Report, named after future U.S. Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan - released March 1965
https://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/29/
John Queen killing Fayette, Miss. Aug. 8, 1965
In August 1965, the civil rights movement was changing the country.
Just two days before Queen was shot, President Lyndon Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act into law.
Still, in Jefferson County, where Fayette is located, blacks outnumbered whites 3 to 1.
But only one black person was registered to vote, according to a report by the U.S. Justice Department.
https://www.npr.org/2013/05/03/
https://www.npr.org/2013/05/03/
June 14, 1965
Jackson, Miss.
demonstration against a special legislative meeting called by the governor
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/13/
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/13/
1965
Racial killings
Civil rights activist Jimmy Lee Jackson (1938-1965)
On the night of 18 February 1965, an Alabama state trooper shot Jimmie Lee Jackson in the stomach as he tried to protect his mother from being beaten at Mack’s Café.
Jackson, along with several other African Americans, had taken refuge there from troopers breaking up a night march protesting the arrest of James Orange, a field secretary for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) in Marion, Alabama.
Jackson died from his wounds eight days later.
Speaking at his funeral, King called Jackson, “a martyred hero of a holy crusade for freedom and human dignity” (King, 3 March 1965). https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/encyclopedia/jackson-jimmie-lee
https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/encyclopedia/
1965
Nazi Picketing
White House Arrival Of
Martin Luther King
Nazi Picketing White House Arrival Of Martin Luther King
Date taken: 1965
Photograph: Francis Miller
Life Images
March from Selma to Montgomery /
Malcolm X is shot dead in Harlem
From June of 1964 to January of '65, just six months, K.K.K. nightriders burned 31 black churches across Mississippi, according to F.B.I. records.
https://www.nytimes.com/1988/12/04/
https://www.nytimes.com/1988/12/04/
1964
Community Relations Service (CRS)
Dubbed “America’s Peacemaker,” the Community Relations Service was established in 1964 as civil rights protesters across the South came under attack.
(...)
The history of the CRS begins with Lyndon Johnson, who as a U.S. senator in the late 1950s envisioned a mediation service that would seek to quell disputes between racial and ethnic groups.
Years later, as president, Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the landmark law that banned racial discrimination in housing, employment, voting education and so-called public accommodations — retail businesses, restaurants, hotels and the like.
Included in the sweeping and transformative legislation were a few brief paragraphs establishing the CRS.
Those paragraphs instructed the new agency to “provide assistance … in resolving disputes, disagreements, or difficulties relating to discriminatory practices based on race, color, or national origin.”
For Johnson, the creation of the CRS “reflected his conviction that most conflict could be negotiated,” according to a forthcoming history of the agency written by Lum and another former CRS leader, Bertram Levine.
It also reflected an uncomfortable truth: The Justice Department didn’t have nearly enough lawyers to sue every business or local government agency that refused to comply with the Civil Rights Act and its prohibition on racial segregation.
Required by law to keep most of its activities confidential, the new agency played a quiet, behind-the-scenes role throughout the second half of the 1960s as civil rights activism swept across the country.
In 1965, CRS staffers were on the ground in Selma, Alabama, the site of some of the ugliest episodes of the era.
After police killed protester Jimmie Lee Jackson and brutalized marchers as they crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge — a horrific event that would come to be known as “Bloody Sunday” — CRS leaders convinced local authorities not to attack subsequent marches led by King and others.
https://www.propublica.org/article/
https://www.propublica.org/article/
Brooklyn Congress of Racial Equality car stall-in protest, New York, 1964
‘An attempt to bring a non-violent message to Brooklyn during the 1964 World’s Fair.’
Steve Schapiro: Heroic Times – in pictures From the civil rights marches to Robert F Kennedy’s presidential campaign, Andy Warhol’s Factory to the filming of Taxi Driver, photojournalist Steve Schapiro has captured many key moments of US history and culture.
As a new exhibition of his 60s and 70s work opens in his hometown of New York, he reveals what it was like to witness history being made G Tue 19 Dec 2017 07.00 GMT
https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/gallery/2017/dec/19/
A demonstrator clashed with a policeman during a civil rights protest in Nashville in 1964.
Photograph: Bettmann Archive/Getty Images
Waiting for a Perfect Protest? NYT SEPT. 1, 2017
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/01/
“Clifford Vaughs, SNCC photographer, is arrested by the National Guard.” 1964.
The Menil Collection, Houston, gift of Edmund Carpenter and Adelaide de Menil.
Photograph: Danny Lyon Magnum Photos
Houston’s Young Curators Look at Culture and Environment By Jonathan Blaustein NYT May. 17, 2016
https://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2016/05/17/
1964
Freedom Summer
Although the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) had labored for civil rights in rural Mississippi since 1961, the organization found that intense and often violent resistance by segregationists in rural areas of Mississippi would not allow for the kind of direct action campaigns that been successful in urban areas such as Montgomery and Birmingham.
The 1964 Freedom Summer project was designed to draw the nation’s attention to the violent oppression experienced by Mississippi blacks who attempted to exercise their constitutional rights, and to develop a grassroots freedom movement that could be sustained long after student activists left Mississippi. http://mlk-kpp01.stanford.edu/index.php/encyclopedia/encyclopedia/enc_freedom_summer_1964/
(the) SNC (popularly pronounced snick) [ Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee ] was sending hundreds of black and white volunteers to the South to teach, set up clinics and register disenfranchised black Southerners.
http://www.nytimes.com/1998/11/16/us/
https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/encyclopedia/
https://www.nytimes.com/1998/11/16/
Nation of Islam
Black separatist movement
Elijah Muhammad
Muhammad, the Nation of Islam leader, preached that integration and intermarriage were wrong and that white people were devils.
It was an idea Ali defended in a 1971 TV interview.
https://www.npr.org/2016/06/04/
https://www.npr.org/2016/06/04/
White supremacist violence during the civil rights era
Former Ku Klux Klansman [ 1934 or 1935 – 2011 ] was convicted on federal kidnapping charges more than 40 years after the abduction, torture and drowning of two black teenagers near the Mississippi-Louisiana border in 1964
[ ... ]
Mr. Moore, a sawmill worker, and Mr. Dee, a college student, were 19 when they disappeared on May 2, 1964, last seen hitchhiking on a highway near Meadville, Miss.
Two months later, on July 12, a fisherman spotted Mr. Moore’s body in a Mississippi River backwater called the Old River.
Mr. Dee was found the next day.
[ ... ]
According to F.B.I. reports, the Klan believed that Mr. Moore and Mr. Dee were Black Muslims plotting an armed uprising.
The two were taken deep into the nearby Homochitto National Forest, where they were tied to trees and whipped.
They were then driven across the state line to Louisiana, where they were tied to an engine block and thrown into the river with tape over their mouths. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/05/us/05seale.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/05/us/05seale.html
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2008/sep/11/
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/25/us/25klan.html
Racial killings
Jacksonville, Fla
Johnnie Mae Chappell is shot dead
On the evening of March 23, 1964, Chappell, a mother of 10, had walked to buy ice cream for her children in Jacksonville, Fla.
When she got home, she realized she’d dropped her pocketbook.
With the help of friends, she retraced her steps along New Kings Road.
A carload of white men drove by with a gun on the front seat.
One of them had earlier declared, “Let’s get a n—–.”
J.W. Rich picked up the gun and fired out the window, hitting Chappell.
“I’ve been shot,” Chappell cried out to those around her.
She died on the way to the hospital. http://blogs.clarionledger.com/jmitchell/tag/johnnie-mae-chappell/
https://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/24/us/24rights.html
https://www.bardofthesouth.com/
1964
Racial killings
Frank Morris, a black shopkeeper, is burnt to death in Louisiana
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/nov/30/
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/24/us/
December 10, 1964
Martin Luther King's Acceptance Speech, on the occasion of the award of the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo
https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/peace/1964/
President Lyndon Baines Johnson 1908-1973
36th President of the United States 1963-1969
President Lyndon Johnson enacts the Civil Rights Bill in the United States, officially ending segregation in the South - July 2 1964
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/04/opinion/04rich.html https://www.archives.gov/research/civil-rights
http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/july/2/ https://www.ourdocuments.gov/doc.php?flash=true&doc=97
http://www.npr.org/2014/04/11/
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/30/
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/14/us/
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/26/
http://www.theguardian.com/world/1964/jul/03/usa.fromthearchive
https://www.nytimes.com/1964/07/04/
https://www.nytimes.com/1964/07/03/
https://www.nytimes.com/1964/06/19/
https://www.nytimes.com/1964/06/19/
https://www.nytimes.com/1964/06/11/
18 January 1964
President Lyndon B. Johnson (1908-1973) meets with Civil Rights leaders
Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929-1968)
Whitney Young (1921-1971)
James Farmer (1920-1999)
President Lyndon B. Johnson meets with Civil Rights leaders Martin Luther King, Jr., Whitney Young, James Farmer
L to R: Martin Luther King, Jr., President Lyndon B. Johnson, Whitney Young, James Farmer
Date 18 January 1964 (1964-01-18)
Source: Lyndon Baines Johnson Library and Museum. Image Serial Number: W425-21. http://photolab.lbjlib.utexas.edu/detail.asp?id=9853
Photograph: Yoichi R. Okamoto http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Lyndon_Johnson_meeting_with_civil_rights_leaders.jpg http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African-American_Civil_Rights_Movement_(1955%E2%80%931968)
16th Street Baptist church bombing
March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom
Martin Luther King Jr. > "I have a dream"
July - August 1963
Leesburg Stockade Stolen Girls
This photo of the group known as the Leesburg Stockade Stolen Girls was taken by Danny Lyons, a former SNCC photographer.
It helped confirm the girls' location to their parents and civil rights activists.
1963.
Photograph: Danny Lyon
They marched for desegregation — then they disappeared for 45 days NPR July 19, 2023 4:29 PM ET
https://www.npr.org/2023/07/19/
In the early 1960s, civil rights protests were picking up speed across the country.
Sometimes, protest marches included children as young as 12 years old.
Usually, children who were arrested at protests were bailed out by activist groups, or eventually released to their parents.
But on July 19, 1963, during a march to desegregate a theater in Americus, Ga., a group of Black girls was arrested — and for the rest of the summer, their parents had no idea where they were.
(...)
Along with at least 13 other girls, Westbrook-Griffin was transported to a single cell of the Leesburg Stockade — an abandoned, Civil-War-era building more than 20 miles away from Americus.
For the next 45 days, the girls would be subject to squalid living conditions.
The stockade lacked running water, plumbing and beds.
As the weeks passed, conditions only deteriorated.
(...)
Throughout July and August, SNCC activists went from jail to jail in search of the missing girls.
At one of SNCC's mass meetings, someone mentioned a rumor that the girls were being held in the old Leesburg Stockade.
Danny Lyon was a photographer for SNCC at the time.
"James Foreman, who was executive secretary, said to go down and check it out," Lyon told Radio Diaries.
Lyon drove to the Leesburg Stockade after dark.
There, he took clandestine pictures of the girls and their living conditions through bars of the building.
Lyon's photos confirmed the girls' location to parents and activists, providing leverage as they fought with authorities for the girls' return.
Finally, on Sept. 1 – 45 days after they were taken – the police released the girls to their parents.
Danny Lyon's photos appeared in Jet magazine in late September and in a special issue of SNCC's The Student Voice newspaper in 1964.
Westbrook-Griffin and the other girls were never formally charged after the march.
They also weren't given a reason for why they were held in the stockade so long.
https://www.npr.org/2023/07/19/
https://www.npr.org/2023/07/19/
23 June 1963
Martin Luther King
Speech at the Great March on Detroit
Two months before the March on Washington, King stood before a throng of 25,000 people at Cobo Hall in Detroit to expound upon making “the American Dream a reality”.
King repeatedly exclaimed, “I have a dream this afternoon”.
He articulated the words of the prophets Amos and Isaiah, declaring that “justice will roll down like waters, and righteousness like a mighty stream,” for “every valley shall be exalted, and every hill and mountain shall be made low”.
As he had done numerous times in the previous two years, King concluded his message imagining the day “when all of God’s children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing with the Negroes in the spiritual of old: Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!”.
http://mlk-kpp01.stanford.edu/index.php/encyclopedia/
is murdered in Jackson, Mississippi
June 11, 1963
Paul Newman and Marlon Brando support members of a group that marched from Berkeley to urge the California Legislature to act on a housing bill.
The actors, pictured on the steps of the State Capitol, flew to Sacramento to urge passage of Gov. Brown’s proposal to ban discrimination in private housing.
Marlon Brando (center) and Paul Newman (right) appeared in front of the California state Capitol in Sacramento in 1963 to support a sit-in for fair housing.
Photograph: Bill Ray
LIFE Magazine photographer Bill Ray’s most iconic pictures — and raunchy Steve McQueen confession NYP January 18, 2020 | 6:40pm
https://nypost.com/2020/01/18
11 June 1963
Kennedy’s civil rights speech
An epochal moment for civil rights in a single day
three seminal events – a standoff with Alabama's governor, a presidential speech and the murder of Medgar Evers – left an indelible mark on American history
(...)
In the early morning of 11 June 1963, Attorney General Robert Kennedy examined maps of the University of Alabama's Tuscaloosa campus as his three young children played by his feet.
Within 18 hours, his brother, the president, had given an impromptu national address on civil rights, the Alabama governor had confronted the federal authorities on national television and blinked, and one of the movement's most prominent leaders had been gunned down outside his home. http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jun/11/civil-rights-anniversary-11-june-1963
June 11, 1963, may not be a widely recognized date these days, but it might have been the single most important day in civil rights history.
That morning, Gov. George Wallace, in an effort to block the integration of the University of Alabama, made his futile “stand at the schoolhouse door.”
That evening, Boston N.A.A.C.P. leaders engaged in their first public confrontation with Louise Day Hicks, the chairwoman of the Boston School Committee, over de facto public school segregation, beginning a decade-long struggle that would boil over into spectacular violence during the early 1970s.
And just after midnight in Jackson, Miss., a white segregationist murdered the civil rights leader
But the most important event was one that almost didn’t happen: a hastily arranged speech that evening by President John F. Kennedy.
Kennedy had dabbled with the idea of going on TV should the Alabama crisis drag out, so when it ended, his staff assumed the plan was off.
But that afternoon he surprised them by calling the three networks and personally requesting airtime at 8 p.m.
He told his speechwriter Theodore Sorensen to start drafting the text, but shortly before he went on air the president was still editing it.
The president had been routinely criticized by black leaders for being timid on civil rights, and no one knew just what to expect when the cameras started filming.
Kennedy began slowly and in a matter-of-fact manner, with an announcement that the National Guard had peacefully enrolled two black students at the University of Alabama over Wallace’s vociferously racist objections.
But he quickly spun that news into a plea for national unity behind what he, for the first time, called a “moral issue.”
It seems obvious today that civil rights should be spoken of in universal terms, but at the time many white Americans still saw it as a regional, largely political question.
And yet here was the leader of the country, asking “every American, regardless of where he lives,” to “stop and examine his conscience.”
Then he went further.
Speaking during the centennial of the Emancipation Proclamation — an anniversary he had assiduously avoided commemorating, earlier that year — Kennedy eloquently linked the fate of African-American citizenship to the larger question of national identity and freedom.
America, “for all its hopes and all its boasts,” observed Kennedy, “will not be fully free until all its citizens are free.” http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/11/opinion/kennedys-civil-rights-triumph.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/11/
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jun/11/
May 30, 1963
Remarks of Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson
Memorial Day, Gettysburg, Pennsylvania
On Memorial Day in 1963, Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson gave a speech in Gettysburg, Pa., that foreshadowed profound changes that would be achieved in only 13 months
(...)
“One hundred years ago, the slave was freed,” Johnson said at the cemetery in a ceremony marking the 100th anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg.
“One hundred years later, the Negro remains in bondage to the color of his skin.”
With those two sentences, Johnson accomplished two things.
He answered King’s “Letter From Birmingham Jail.” [ April 16, 1963 ]
And he signaled where the later Johnson administration might lead, which was to the legislation now known as the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/26/
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/26/
Benjamin Franklin Lewis 1909-1963
Lewis, right, was known for his sharp dress and gregarious personality as he worked his way up in the Democratic machine.
Photography: Collection of the Chicago History Museum
The Murder Chicago Didn’t Want to Solve ProPublica Feb. 25, 2021 5 a.m. EST https://www.propublica.org/article/ben-lewis-murder
American politician who served as alderman of Chicago's 24th ward from 1958 until he was murdered in his ward office in 1963. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benjamin_F._Lewis - 26 February 2021
https://www.propublica.org/article/
On February 9 1963, William Zantzinger, a rich young farmer, struck Hattie Carroll, a black barmaid, with his cane.
She died that night; he got six months.
Her story lives on in Bob Dylan's brilliant protest song - but where is Zantzinger now?
And did The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll really change anything?
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2005/feb/25/
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2005/feb/25/
Would-be voters lining up to register at the Chatham County Courthouse in Savannah, Ga., in 1963.
Photograph: Frederick Baldwin
Frederick Baldwin, Whose Photography Told Stories, Dies at 92 He saw the camera as “a passport to the world” that helped him document nature, the civil rights movement and life in rural America. NYT Dec. 22, 2021
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/22/
Related
Savannah, Ga. 1963.
Photograph: Fred Baldwin
At 90, Photographer Fred Baldwin Still Has ‘So Much Work Left to Do’ Having documented Sami herders and the civil rights movement, and having just published a memoir, the photographer says his life’s work is far from complete. NYT May 29, 2019
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/29/
Students registering to vote, Chatham County Courthouse in Savannah, Ga., 1963.
Photograph: Fred Baldwin
Why Did Racial Progress Stall in America? The answer may show us the path out of our fractured and polarized present. NYT Dec. 4, 2020
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/04/
“Big” Lester Hankerson during a voter registration push outside the Longshoreman’s Hall, Savannah, Ga., 1963.
Photograph: Fred Baldwin
Why Did Racial Progress Stall in America? The answer may show us the path out of our fractured and polarized present. NYT Dec. 4, 2020
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/04/
1962
'Reverse Freedom Rides'
The Reverse Freedom Riders Eddie Rose, Almer Payton and Willie Ramsey are shown with Citizens Council director George Singlemann.
Photograph: Jim Bourdier AP
The Cruel Story Behind The 'Reverse Freedom Rides' WBAA 29 February 2020 https://www.wbaa.org/post/cruel-story-behind-reverse-freedom-rides
Fuming over the civil rights movement, Southern segregationists had concocted a way to retaliate against Northern liberals.
In 1962, they tricked about 200 African Americans from the South into moving north.
The idea was simple: When large numbers of African Americans showed up on Northern doorsteps, Northerners would not be able to accommodate them.
They would not want them, and their hypocrisy would be exposed.
The Reverse Freedom Rides have largely disappeared from the country's collective memory.
The scheme almost never appears in history books and is little-known even in Hyannis, the primary target of the ploy.
But some hear echoes of that segregationist past in America's present.
And for the families that came to the North based on a lie, the journey has cast an enduring shadow on their lives.
(...)
In the summer of 1961, black and white activists, who became known as the Freedom Riders, boarded Greyhound buses and crisscrossed the South with the goal of integrating interstate buses and bus terminals.
When the buses pulled into Southern cities, they were greeted by mobs armed with bats and firebombs.
Southern segregationists, who were still furious over the school desegregation fights that dominated the 1950s, saw the Freedom Riders as sanctimonious provocateurs.
In a television interview from the time, Ned Touchstone of Louisiana —a spokesperson for a local segregationist group— said the North was "sending down busloads of people here with the express purpose of violating our laws, fomenting confusion, trying to destroy 100 years of workable tradition and good relations between the races."
Touchstone and other segregationists thought there was no way the Freedom Riders or their fellow Northern liberals actually cared about integrating interstate transit or advancing civil rights.
Instead, they were convinced it was a strategy to embarrass the South and capture black votes for the Democratic party.
The segregationists decided to answer the Freedom Rides with the "Reverse Freedom Rides."
They would use the same weapon —Greyhound buses— and send African Americans to Northern cities.
"For many years, certain politicians, educators and certain religious leaders have used the white people of the South as a whipping boy, to put it mildly, to further their own ends and their political campaigns," said Amis Guthridge, a lawyer from Arkansas who helped spearhead the Reverse Freedom Rides.
"We're going to find out if people like Ted Kennedy ... and the Kennedys, all of them, really do have an interest in the Negro people, really do have a love for the Negro."
The segregationists tapped into a network of local groups called Citizens' Councils.
Despite the sanitized name, the councils were essentially "the Ku Klux Klan without the hoods and the masks," said historian Clive Webb.
https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2020/02/29/
https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2020/02/29/
https://www.nytimes.com/1962/10/09/
April 1962
Cpl. Roman Ducksworth Jr. is killed in Taylorsville, Miss.
On April 9, 1962, Cpl. Roman Ducksworth, Jr., a military police officer, was killed by Police Officer William Kelly.
Ducksworth was traveling to Mississippi on an interstate bus from Forth Ritchie, Maryland to visit his wife who was expecting their sixth child.
There are two different accounts about the events leading up to Ducksworth’s death.
The NAACP took on the case, reporting that Kelly shot Ducksworth after he refused Officer Kelly’s order to move to the back of the bus.
Ducksworth insisted that he had a right to sit where he chose on the bus.
Ducksworth’s brother gave a different account of the events.
According to Ducksworth’s brother, when the bus arrived in Taylorsville, Mississippi, Ducksworth’s hometown, Kelly came aboard the bus and awoke Ducksworth by hitting him.
Officer Kelly ordered Ducksworth off the bus to beat him.
Officer Kelly then shot Ducksworth in the heart.
According to this account, Kelly may have mistaken Ducksworth for a “freedom rider” because the bus traveled on the same roads as the Freedom Riders, who were hated in the area for testing bus desegregation laws. http://nuweb9.neu.edu/civilrights/roman-duckworth-jr/
https://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/24/
1960
U.S. Supreme Court Boynton v. Virginia, 364 U.S. 454 (1960) Boynton v. Virginia Decided December 5, 1960
CERTIORARI TO THE SUPREME COURT OF APPEALS OF VIRGINIA
Syllabus
For refusing to leave the section reserved for white people in a restaurant in a bus terminal, petitioner, a Negro interstate bus passenger, was convicted in Virginia courts of violating a state statute making it a misdemeanor for any person "without authority of law" to remain upon the premises of another after having been forbidden to do so.
On appeal, he contended that his conviction violated the Interstate Commerce Act and the Equal Protection, Due Process and Commerce Clauses of the Federal Constitution; but his conviction was sustained by the State Supreme Court.
On petition for certiorari to this Court, he raised only the constitutional questions. http://supreme.justia.com/us/364/454/case.html
https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/364/454/
May 1960
LIFE and Civil Rights: Anatomy of a Protest, Virginia
LIFE.com presents a gallery of photos — many of which never ran in LIFE magazine — from a series of protests and sit-ins in Petersburg, Virgina, in May 1960, and from a broader-themed planning conference sponsored by Martin Luther King Jr. and the Southern Christian leadership Council at Atlanta University earlier that month.
The pictures, by LIFE’s Howard Sochurek — a Princeton grad, Neiman Fellow at Harvard and WWII Army vet — capture one small but significant exemplar of the sit-in phenomenon, as well as some of the unusual training methods that potential sitters-in endured before taking to the streets and to the seats.
In notes sent to LIFE’s editors in New York from the magazine’s Washington, DC, bureau in May 1960, the sit-in movement’s activities in Virginia were dubbed the “Second Siege of Petersburg” — a tongue-in-cheek reference to the famous siege of the town and nearby Richmond between June 1864 and April 1865 during the Civil War. http://life.time.com/history/civil-rights-photos-from-sit-ins-and-protest-training-sessions-1960/#1
A view of African-American integrationists attending a meeting.
Location: Petersburg, VA, US
Date taken: 1960
Photograph: Howard Sochurek
Life Images http://images.google.com/hosted/life/60d7b207414d6513.html
early 1960s
“We Shall Overcome” freedom anthem
The folk singer Guy Carawan (1927-2015) and the Rev. Wyatt T. Walker led a group of civil rights protesters singing “We Shall Overcome” at Virginia State University in 1960.
Photograph: Eve Arnold Magnum Photos
Birth of a Freedom Anthem NYT MARCH 14, 2015
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/15/
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/08/
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/15/
February and March 1959
Dr. Martin Luther King and his wife, Coretta Scott King, travel throughout India
https://www.npr.org/templates/story/
1956
Montgomery, Alabama
Browder v. Gayle
Mr. Gray used a diagram of a bus to help illustrate his case in Browder v. Gayle, brought on behalf of Black Americans in Montgomery in 1956.
Photograph: Don Cravens The LIFE Images Collection via Getty Images/Getty Images
For a Civil Rights Hero, 90, a New Battle Unfolds on His Childhood Street Before he defended Rosa Parks and became a leading legal force, Fred Gray grew up on an avenue named for Jefferson Davis in Montgomery, Ala. Now a push is underway for a new name for the street: Mr. Gray’s. NYT Dec. 25, 2020 1:40 p.m. ET
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/25/
Browder v. Gayle, 352 U.S. 903
Basing its decision on Brown v. Board of Education, the Supreme Court says the Montgomery bus segregation rule violates the constitution.
The Montgomery Bus Boycott - and the bus system's segregation, end (on) Dec. 21, 1956
https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/encyclopedia/
Browder v. Gayle, 142 F. Supp. 707 (1956) was a case heard before a three-judge panel of the United States District Court for the Middle District of Alabama on Montgomery and Alabama state bus segregation laws. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Browder_v._Gayle
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/25/
1955-1956
382-day Montgomery Bus Boycott
Montgomery Bus Boycott
Photographer: Grey Villet
Undated
Life Images http://images.google.com/hosted/life/l?imgurl=f39dd2741830a2c0
On Montgomery buses, the first four rows were reserved for whites.
The rear was for blacks, who made up more than 75 percent of the bus system's riders.
Blacks could sit in the middle rows until those seats were needed by whites.
Then blacks had to move to seats in the rear, stand or, if there was no room, leave the bus.
Even getting on presented hurdles: If whites were already sitting in the front, blacks could board to pay the fare but then had to disembark and re-enter through the rear door.
The boycott lasted 381 days, and in that period many blacks were harassed and arrested on flimsy excuses.
https://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/25/
https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/encyclopedia/
https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2023/03/22/
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/25/
https://www.npr.org/2020/09/22/
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/20/
https://www.npr.org/2019/09/13/
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/13/
http://www.npr.org/2015/11/12/
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/28/us/
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/26/us/
https://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/25/
An Atlanta trolley in 1956, before the Supreme Court decision outlawing segregation on all public buses.
Photograph: Horace Cort Associated Press
FEATURE America’s Enduring Caste System Our founding ideals promise liberty and equality for all. Our reality is an enduring racial hierarchy that has persisted for centuries. NYT July 1, 2020
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/01/
Dec. 1, 1955
Rosa Parks is arrested in Montgomery, Alabama, for refusing to relinquish her seat to a white man and move to the "negro" section near the back of the city bus
https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/king-papers/documents/
https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/encyclopedia/
July 25, 1941 - August 28, 1955
Racial killing
Lamar Smith 1892 - August 13, 1955
Lamar Smith, a 63 year old farmer and World War II veteran was a voting rights activist and a member of the Regional Counsel of Negro Leadership.
On August 2, he had voted in the primary and helped get others out to vote.
There was a run-off primary scheduled for August 23, and, on August 13, Smith was at the courthouse seeking to assist black voters to fill out absentee ballots so they could vote in the run-off election.
He was shot to death in the front of the courthouse in Brookhaven, Lincoln County, at about 10 am.
(...)
Three men were arrested in connection with the Smith murder.
On September 13, 1955, an all white Brookhaven grand jury failed to return any indictments.
The District Attorney reported that the Sheriff, Carnie E. Smith, refused to make an immediate arrest “although he knew everything I know.”
The District Attorney further reported that the sheriff told him he saw Noah Smith, one of the accused, “leave the scene with blood all over him. It was his duty to take that man into custody regardless of who he was, but he did not do it.” http://nuweb9.neu.edu/civilrights/lamar-smith/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
May 17, 1954
School desegregation
Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas
U.S. Supreme Court Justice Earl Warren delivers the unanimous ruling
in the landmark civil rights case SUPREME COURT OF THE UNITED STATES 347 U.S. 483 Argued December 9, 1952 Reargued December 8, 1953 Decided May 17, 1954 APPEAL FROM THE UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT FOR THE DISTRICT OF KANSAS
https://www.thirteen.org/wnet/supremecourt/rights/
https://nationalcenter.org/ncppr/2001/11/06/ https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/347/483 https://www.loc.gov/exhibits/brown/brown-segregation.html https://www.loc.gov/exhibits/brown/brown-aftermath.html https://www.archives.gov/education/lessons/brown-v-board https://www.archives.gov/education/lessons/brown-case-order https://www.archives.gov/education/lessons/davis-case https://learning.blogs.nytimes.com/on-this-day/may-17/
https://www.npr.org/2017/08/20/
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/18/us/
www.nytimes.com/2014/05/17/us/
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/10/weekinreview/10liptak.html
Harry Briggs Jr. 1941-2016
From left, Linda Brown Smith, Harry Briggs Jr., Ethel Louise Belton Brown and Spottswood Bolling Jr. at a news conference in 1964.
Mr. Briggs’s parents originated the lawsuit that put an end to public school segregation.
Photograph: Al Ravenna New York World-Telegram & Sun Collection, via Library of Congress
Harry Briggs Jr., a Catalyst for Brown v. Board of Education, Dies at 75 NYT AUG. 17, 2016
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/18/us/
Harry Briggs Jr. ('s) parents originated the pivotal lawsuit that struck down public school segregation in 1954, but whose name was relegated by fate to a forgotten legal footnote
(...)
Mr. Briggs’s parents were furious that 8-year-old Harry and his fellow black students in Clarendon County, S.C., were forced to walk as far as 10 miles to attend classes while whites were bused at public expense to their own segregated school.
With Harry Briggs Sr. listed alphabetically as the lead plaintiff, the local chapter of the N.A.A.C.P. filed suit in 1949 against the school district in a case argued by Thurgood Marshall, who would become the first black justice of the United States Supreme Court.
When it reached$ the Supreme Court, Briggs v. Elliott was merged with four similar cases and became known collectively as Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kan.
The N.A.A.C.P. lawyers argued that segregation itself, and the concept of “separate but equal” schools for blacks and whites, violated the 14th Amendment’s “equal protection” guarantee.
Why did Brown — the Rev. Oliver L. Brown, who stood in for his daughter Linda, a third grader, on the legal papers — instead of Briggs wind up being immortalized as a benchmark in civil rights jurisprudence?
Historians have attributed the naming convention to a scheduling quirk involving the five lawsuits, although there has been some speculation that Tom C. Clark, a Supreme Court justice from Texas, gave Brown prominence, figuring that advancing a case from Kansas, instead of one from South Carolina, would make it appear less like the court was singling out the South.
Reversing the court’s 1896 decision the justices ruled unanimously on May 14, 1954, that “in the field of public education the doctrine of ‘separate, but equal’ has no place” because “separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/18/us/
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/18/
George Corley Wallace Jr. 1919-1998
Time Covers - The 60S Time cover: 09-27-1963 of Gov. George Wallace.
Date taken: September 27, 1963
Life Images
https://archives.alabama.gov/govs_list/g_wallac.html https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/films/wallace/
https://www.npr.org/2003/06/11/
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/20/
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/20/
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jun/11/
Earl Francis Lloyd 1928-2015
Earl Lloyd (...) became the first black player to appear in an N.B.A. game when he took the court for the Washington Capitols in October 1950, three and a half years after Jackie Robinson broke modern major league baseball’s color barrier
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/28/
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/28/
A man viewing a large sign announcing a restrictive policy at Sunset Gardens, a housing development limited to whites. Los Angeles. September 1950.
Photograph: Irving C. Smith, via Southern California Library for Social Studies and Research
Photographing Civil Rights, Up North and Beyond Dixie NYT Oct. 18, 2016
http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2016/10/18/
Carter Godwin Woodson 1875-1950
Black History Month has been celebrated in the United States for close to a hundred years.
Leaders like Carter G. Woodson created the annual observance to ensure that the history of Black people in the United States received the importance and scholarly attention it deserves.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/31/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/29/
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/31/
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/
https://www.nytimes.com/1950/04/05/
https://www.nytimes.com/1933/02/26/
https://www.nytimes.com/1926/10/24/
More African-American men, women and children were hanged, burned and dismembered per capita in Mississippi between the Civil War and World War II than in any other Southern state.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/25/
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/25/
The Groveland Four Florida 1949
Reuben Hatcher, the jailer at left, stood with Charles Greenlee, Samuel Shepherd and Walter Irvin, three of the four men known as the Groveland Four, in August 1949.
At right is Sheriff Willis McCall, who later shot Mr. Shepherd and Mr. Irvin.
Photograph via Gary Corsair
Florida Pardons the Groveland Four, 70 Years After Jim Crow-Era Rape Case NYT Jan. 11, 2019
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/11/
The Groveland Four (or the Groveland Boys) were four young African-American men, Earnest Thomas, Charles Greenlee (then a minor at age 16), Samuel Shepherd and Walter Irvin, who in 1949 were accused of raping a 17-year-old white woman and assaulting her husband in Lake County, Florida. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groveland_Four
https://www.pbs.org/show/
https://www.npr.org/2022/02/01/
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/11/
https://www.npr.org/2019/01/11/
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/jan/11/
Feb.1946
Isaac Woodard (1919-1992) is blinded by police officers in Batesburg, S.C.
Joe Louis, the heavyweight champion, left, helps guide Isaac Woodard up the stairs, along with Neil Scott, the author of “Joe Louis: A Picture Story of His Life.”
They met at a benefit in Harlem.
Photograph: Ossie LeViness NY Daily News Archive, via Getty Images
A South Carolina Judge Writes a Book About a Predecessor, an Unsung Giant of Civil Rights Law NYT Jan. 19, 2019
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/19/
On Feb. 12, 1946, Army sergeant Isaac Woodard, 26, discharged with a chest of medals after three years of fighting in the Pacific in a segregated unit, boarded a Greyhound bus from Camp Gordon in Augusta, Ga., en route to home in Winnsboro, S.C.
There were conflicting accounts of what happened on that bus.
Joyous soldiers, black and white, may have been sharing a celebratory bottle of whiskey.
Woodard and the driver argued about restroom breaks and Greyhound’s rules requiring a driver to accommodate passengers’s needs.
When the bus stopped in Batesburg, a small town about 30 miles from Columbia, the state capital, the driver summoned the town’s two police officers, Chief Lynwood Shull and his deputy, Elliot Long, and Woodard was ordered off the bus.
Shull admitted using his blackjack on the sergeant.
When Woodard wrested it away, Long, gun drawn, ordered him to drop it.
Then, by the Gergel book’s account, Shull rained blows on Woodard so ferociously the blackjack broke.
Woodard was left sightless, both eyes gouged out, and thrown in jail, igniting a racial fuse that would burn its way across America to Waring, the White House and eventually the Supreme Court.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/19/
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/19/
https://www.npr.org/templates/
July 16, 1944
Morgan v. Virginia
In the spring of 1946, a black woman, boarded a bus in Virginia to go to Baltimore, Maryland.
She was ordered to sit in the back of the bus, as Virginia state law required.
She objected, saying that since the bus was an interstate bus, the Virginia law did not apply.
Morgan was arrested and fined ten dollars.
Thurgood Marshall and the NAACP took on the case.
They argued that since an 1877 Supreme Court decision ruled that it was illegal for a state to forbid segregation, then it was likewise illegal for a state to require it. http://www.pbs.org/wnet/jimcrow/stories_events_morgan.html
https://www.thirteen.org/wnet/jimcrow/
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/13/us/
June 1943
Detroit, MI
Wartime race riots between blacks and whites
African American men rounded up after wartime race riots between blacks and whites which swept the city and required the use of Army troops and martial law to quell.
Location: Detroit, MI, US
Date taken: June 20, 1943
Photograph: Gordon Coster
Life Images
In 1941, President Franklin D. Roosevelt promulgated Executive Order 8802, which prohibited racial discrimination in the employment of workers in defense industries and established the Fair Employment Practices Commission to implement the order.
Assailing the order, Representative Jamie Whitten, a Mississippi segregationist, complained that it would not so much prevent unfairness as “discriminate in favor of the negro” — this at a time when anti-Black discrimination across the social landscape was blatant, rife and, to a large extent, fully lawful.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/07/
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/07/
A flag flying outside the N.A.A.C.P. offices on Fifth Avenue, announcing that another lynching had taken place in America. New York. 1936.
Photographer Unknown, via Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division
Photographing Civil Rights, Up North and Beyond Dixie NYT Oct. 18, 2016
http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2016/10/18/
Route 66’s legacy of racial segregation
The Negro Motorist Green Book, published 1936-1964, was more than a guide book;
it was a lifesaver in the racist world of southern and western US states, featuring motels and businesses that extended their services to black travellers before the civil rights movement helped bring about change
http://www.theguardian.com/travel/2015/feb/27/
http://www.theguardian.com/travel/2015/feb/27/
1930s
Alabama
The Scottsboro Boys
ATLANTA — [ 2013 ]
More than 80 years after they were falsely accused and wrongly convicted in the rapes of a pair of white women in north Alabama, three black men received posthumous pardons on Thursday, essentially absolving the last of the “Scottsboro Boys” of criminal misconduct and closing one of the most notorious chapters of the South’s racial history.
The Alabama Board of Pardons and Paroles voted unanimously during a hearing in Montgomery to issue the pardons to Haywood Patterson, Charles Weems and Andy Wright, all of whom were repeatedly convicted of the rapes in the 1930s.
“The Scottsboro Boys have finally received justice,” Gov. Robert J. Bentley said in a statement.
Thursday’s vote brought to an end to a case that yielded two landmark Supreme Court opinions — one about the inclusion of blacks on juries and another about the need for adequate legal representation at trial — but continued to hang over Alabama as an enduring mark of its tainted past.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/22/us/
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/22/us/
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/nov/21/
In 1924, the Virginia legislature passed the Racial Integrity Act, which outlawed interracial marriage, in part by reclassifying American Indians as “colored.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/22/
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/22/
1919
a wave of anti-black violence (...) roiled the United States in 1919. https://time.com/5636454/what-is-red-summer/
“Red Summer”
Omaha riot: how a white mob lynched a Black man and destroyed a city – 360 video G 9 July 2021
Omaha riot: how a white mob lynched a Black man and destroyed a city – 360 video Video The Guardian 9 July 2021
In 1919, a white mob stormed into an Omaha courthouse looking for a Black man named Will Brown whom they believed raped a white woman two days earlier.
The newly elected mayor tried to reason with the mob, only to be nearly hanged before police saved him.
The white mob eventually got to Brown, dragged him out on to the street and lynched him.
No one was fully held accountable for these events.
YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Fw47SNONkY
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/series/red-summers
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/jul/09/
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/08/
https://time.com/5636454/what-is-red-summer/
1919
Elaine massacre
a shoot-out between local white law enforcement and armed African American guards protecting a sharecroppers' union meeting triggered a race massacre here.
In the following days, as many as a thousand white civilians and militia, fearing a black insurrection, swarmed the Elaine area, killing black men, women and children.
https://www.npr.org/2019/09/29/
Most historical accounts of the massacre there, including contemporaneous reporting by the prominent African American journalist Ida B. Wells, relate that Black sharecroppers were meeting at a church in a place called Hoop Spur on the town's outskirts.
The farmers were organizing for a larger portion of the profits from their cotton.
Late on the night of Sept. 30, 1919, a group of local white men surrounded the church.
Although it isn't clear who fired first, a shot from within the church claimed the first victim — a white man.
The following day, a rampage ensued, with whites targeting Black farmers and their families.
The governor dispatched soldiers to put down the violence, which was characterized by white landowners as an "insurrection."
https://www.npr.org/2022/12/11/
https://www.npr.org/2022/12/11/
https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2019/09/30/
https://www.npr.org/2019/09/29/
https://www.nprillinois.org/post/
https://www.nytimes.com/1919/10/02/
Chicago's race riots / red summer
1917
white mobs firebombe homes and decimate a Black community in Illinois
After the first world war, Black laborers moved to northern towns like East St Louis, Illinois, trying to escape Jim Crow in the south.
In 1917, members of the White American Federation of Labor went on strike – and the company responded by hiring Black workers.
Angry white workers began attacking Black people in the city.
Eventually this leads to white mobs firebombing houses with Black families inside, while others outside waited to shoot and kill them.
Historians estimate between 39 and 150 Black people were killed in the East St Louis riots.
Just months later, another race riot in Houston broke out after member of the all-white Houston police department arrested a high-ranking soldier in an all-Black army regiment – a group that had recently returned from war.
Only the Black soldiers were penalized.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/video/2021/dec/18/
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/video/2021/dec/18/
The Houston Riot of 1917, or Camp Logan Riot, was a mutiny by 156 African American soldiers of the Third Battalion of the all-black Twenty-fourth United States Infantry Regiment.
It occupied most of one night, and resulted in the deaths of four soldiers and sixteen civilians.
The rioting soldiers were tried at three courts-martial.
A total of nineteen would be executed, and forty-one were given life sentences. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Houston_riot_of_1917
110 Black soldiers were convicted of murder, mutiny and other crimes at three military trials held at Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio.
Nineteen were hanged, including 13 on a single day, Dec. 11, 1917, in the largest mass execution of American soldiers by the Army.
The soldiers’ families spent decades fighting to show that the men had been betrayed by the military.
In November (2023), they won a measure of justice when the Army secretary, Christine E. Wormuth, overturned the convictions and acknowledged that the soldiers “were wrongly treated because of their race and were not given fair trials.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/22/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
https://www.houstonpublicmedia.org/articles/civil-rights/2023/11/13/
circa 1915 - 1970s
The great migration
black Southerners (...) fled to cities in the North and West during the Great Migration.
That mass exodus of African-Americans began (circa 1915), and lasted until the 1970s.
https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2015/04/10/
https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2015/04/10/
1898
Wilmington massacre
On Nov. 10, 1898, a mob descended on the offices of The Daily Record, a Black-owned newspaper in Wilmington, N.C.
The armed men then moved into the streets and opened fire as Black men fled for their lives.
Finally, the rabble seized control of the racially mixed city government.
It expelled Black aldermen, installed unelected whites belonging to the then-segregationist Democratic Party and published a "White Declaration of Independence."
Historians have called it a coup d'etat.
The number of people who died ranges from about 60 to as many as 250, according to some estimates.
https://www.npr.org/2021/11/10/
https://eji.org/news/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/nov/10/
https://www.npr.org/2021/11/10/
1896
Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537 "separate but equal"
On June 7, 1892, a racially mixed shoemaker from New Orleans named Homer Plessy bought a first-class ticket for a train bound for Covington, La., and took a seat in the whites-only car.
He was asked to leave, and after he refused, he was dragged from the train and charged with violating the Louisiana Separate Car Act.
He pleaded guilty and was fined $25.
(...)
The arrest elevated Plessy into the central figure in a legal battle that reached the U.S. Supreme Court.
The landmark ruling that resulted in the case, Plessy v. Ferguson, came to be regarded as one of most shameful decisions in the court’s history as well as one of the most consequential.
It endorsed the “separate but equal” doctrine and gave legal backing to the Jim Crow laws that segregated and disenfranchised African Americans in the South for decades.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/12/
In 1892 Homer Plessy challenged a 1890 law by the Louisiana General Assembly which required white and nonwhite passengers to ride in separate railway carriages.
Plessy, a light-skinned man, argued that the law was null and void because race could not always be determined by appearances.
Plessy was arrested for violating the statute and the case was tried before the Louisiana Supreme Court.
The court upheld the law and, in 1896 Plessy petitioned for the United States Supreme Court for a writ of error which would overturn the state court's ruling.
Justice Brown for the majority opinion, however, ruled that the statute did not violate to the U.S. Constitution and that separate accommodations could be required as long as they were "equal."
Justice Harlan wrote a dissenting opinion in which he argued that any arbitrary separation of citizens based on race could never be constitutional and would only lead to increased racial tension in the United States. http://history.ncsu.edu/projects/cwnc/items/show/366
https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/163/537 https://cwnc.omeka.chass.ncsu.edu/items/show/366 https://www.loc.gov/item/today-in-history/may-18/ https://www.thirteen.org/wnet/jimcrow/stories_events_plessy.html https://www.loc.gov/item/today-in-history/may-18/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/12/
9 March 1892
a white mob in Memphis, Tennessee, lynched Thomas Moss and his business partners Will Stewart and Calvin McDowell.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jun/19/
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jun/19/
The Civil Rights Era in the U.S. News & World Report Photographs Collection
Selected Images from the Collections of the Library of Congress
https://www.loc.gov/rr/print/list/084_civil.html
Library of Congress
Photographs of Signs Enforcing Racial Discrimination:
Documentation by Farm Security Administration-Office of War Information Photographers
Esther Bubley, photographer. "People waiting for a bus at the Greyhound bus terminal."
[Sign: "White Waiting Room."] Location: E-5153 Reproduction Number: LC-USW3-37973-E https://www.loc.gov/rr/print/list/085_disc.html
https://www.loc.gov/rr/print/list/085_disc.html
Related > Anglonautes > History > America, USA
20th century > USA > Civil rights > Black power
20th century > USA > Civil rights
17th, 18th, 19th, 20th century
Related > Anglonautes > History > UK
Related > Anglonautes > Vocapedia
Anglonautes > Arts > Photographers > 20th century > USA > Civil rights
James "Spider" Martin 1939-2003
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