Charlie Mershon

The Civil Rights movement begun with a debated election in 1876 in the end of

Reconstruction, as elevating malevolence magnified among blacks along with whites as blacks

were abruptly starting to command political offices as well as function better for themselves,

which intimidated the old-fashioned whites accordance of authority. Throughout this era the

blacks experience in America was one of numerous conflicting along with sometimes-intense

features; there existed racial segregation, disfranchisement, violence, as well as Exploitation.

The Jim Crow laws once enacted were the genesis of what prevailed as separate but equal

which persevered extensively into the civil rights movement until the 1950’s. This was not only

in place in the “good '‘ol South”, but most the country, and was to be; whites have theirs, and

blacks or “coloreds” have theirs. (Joseph, 2006) The law stated that the places, services, and

items that were to be segregated not only be fair but equal. This was rarely the case; where a

white school may receive 20-30 dollars per student, a black school would receive $2.50 per

student. Boorishly this disproportion portrayed anything except separate but equal (Joseph,

2006).

This was an era of stops and starts, in which some movements, such as Marcus Garvey's

Universal Negro Improvement Association, were very successful but left little lasting legacy,

while others, such as the NAACP's painstaking legal assault on state-sponsored segregation,

achieved modest results in its early years but made steady progress on voter rights and gradually

built to a key victory in Brown v. Board of Education(Bois, 1994).

With the northern movement taking place many blacks were able to establish themselves

elsewhere and achieve great success in any field of work they choose to seek having no real cap

on their ability thanks to the victory of Brown v. B.O.E. Although still suffering some

segregation in housing opportunities in parts of the towns, as well as education for the most part

blacks’ situation was on the upswing for the time being over all in the North.
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The tactics for the first part of the Civil Rights movement was an attempt at nonviolence

and civil disobedience to bring attention to the obvious hypocrisies that were the non-serving of

blacks yet merchandise transactions in white owned locations(Joseph, 2006). Using methods of

“Sit Ins,” Boycotts, and Freedom Rides blacks as well as white sympathizers sought to end the

race problems that had been so long an issue that derived from a religious and economic

standpoint dating back to the 1500’s with the Spanish and European’s in America’s early years.

Rosa Parks considered as the “Mother of the Civil Rights Movement” for her simple act

of refusal to move from her seat on a Montgomery city bus on December 1, 1955. She was an

ordinary individual who was a secretary of the Montgomery NAACP chapter and had been on

her way home from where nonviolent civil disobedience as a form of resistance was being

endocrine. She received a guilty verdict for disorderly conduct and violating local

ordnance(Joseph, 2006).

It was in the year of 1955, following Rosa Parks’ arrest on December 1st, that the

Montgomery Improvement Association which created to lead the Montgomery Bus Boycott

which had a 381 day run in which most of the 50,000 African-American population in the

community did not ride the public transit system to disrupt the economic structure in the city.

This lead to the federal court ordering Montgomery’s buses be desegregated in November of

1956. That propelled Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Into the well-known individual that was to be

the figurehead of most of the N.A.A.C.P.’s events and actions. This was not the last time that Dr.

King would be in the forefront of an event that would cause controversy and subversion on the

part of the black community to have their Civil Rights.

In the next year the desegregation of the public school system was to begin with, the

senior high (grades 10-12) then the junior high schools (grades 7-9) would be integrated with the

successful integration at the senior level, followed by elementary schools. Although the city of
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Little Rock chose to leave the all black school, Horace Mann, open they allowed very few black

students, 17 in all, into the white school of Central High(Bois, 1994). Out of these 17 due to fear

of violence only nine still chose to enter Central High the upcoming year and the would be met

with some of the most hostile greetings that one could imagine. Some of the mothers were

informed the blacks and whites were forming gangs and were armed with guns and knives. The

situation was so tense that when the first days of the integration had begun the President at the

time, Eisenhower had to go so far as to call in the National Guard to walk the students to and

from school daily to ensure their safety. Out of the nine that started the integration, only one got

the chance to graduate, after the 57-58 school year ended, Little Rock school system decided to

close public schools rather than continue to integrate(Joseph, 2006).

In the following years, there were many more schools that integrated and closings

because of legislation that allowed blacks into traditional white schools. This act of legislature

had little affect when it came to stores and serving black customers at lunch lines and counters.

Therefore, as students across the south began to “sit-in” at the lunch counters of local stores

some local authority figures used brute force to remove these students from the seats of lunch

facilities (August Meier, 1976, 2002). This technique of resistance was not new however; in

1939, Samuel Tucker organized a sit-in at Alexandriana, VA library. The rash of these sit-ins

across the south lead to attention to the movement nationally with the largest success of this

being in Nashville, TN(Joseph, 2006).

During World War II, there was a major demand for workers in the wartime industry and

with whites going off to fight the war there was an abundance of black workers ready to step up

and fill the places left by the whites since the military was still for the most part a segregated

institution. When factories would not hire blacks and instead chose whites in place of qualified
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black men, A. Phillip Randolph approached the president who at the time happened to be,

Roosevelt, and confronted him with several demands(August Meier, 1976, 2002). Stating that if

these mandates were not met, he would have 100, 000 blacks march on the Capital and with

Executive order 8802 Roosevelt quelled this threat by barring racial discrimination on the part of

wartime industry companies. Unlike the planned 1941 March, the 1963 march was a

collaborative effort of all major civil rights organizations, the progressive, and other liberal

organizations all with several goals in mind. The goals were as follow: Meaning civil rights laws,

a massive federal works program, full and fair employment, decent housing, right to vote, and

adequate integrated education(August Meier, 1976, 2002). The march was a success with turn

out of an estimated 200-300,000 demonstrators gathering in front of the Lincoln Memorial.

While many applauded the Kennedy Administration for its work in the civil rights legislation,

many still took the administration to task for not doing more to protect southern blacks and civil

rights workers in the Deep South.

When Rev. Lawson invited King to Memphis in March 1968, it would have been

inconceivable to think that an event designed to support a strike by the sanitation workers would

have been the last thing Dr. King would ever do in his lifetime towards Civil Rights. On April 4,

1968, while in his hotel in Memphis, TN he would be shot by a sniper and killed. The day before

his funeral, his widow and three of his children led 20,000 demonstrators through the streets of

Memphis, holding signs that read “Honor King: End Racism” and “Union Justice Now”. On

April 9, Mrs. King led another 150,000 in a funeral procession through Atlanta (Jones, 2006).

With King’s assassination the black population of the country went in disbelief and began

to riot and destroy everything in the black communities in anger and disbelief, this was a pivotal

moment in the movement that allowed more radical types of groups to step up and begin to form
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and speak out and be heard. People believed that if a peaceful man like King were killed for

trying to be civil and non-violent then maybe pacifism was not the answer.

Black Power is a political slogan for ideologies, it is used in the movement to emphasize

racial pride and the creation of black political and cultural institutions to nurture and promote

black collective interest. First coined by Kwame Ture (Stokely Carmicheal) and Mukasa Dada

(Willie Ricks), spokespersons for Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). After

the shooting of James Meredith in 1966, Ture said, “This is the twenty-seventh time I have been

arrested and I ain't going to jail no more! The only way we gonna stop them white men from

whuppin’ us is to take over. What gonna start sayin’ now is Black Power!” (Luders, 2005)

This is some of the fiery rhetoric gave by Black Power leaders; there were several groups

of these the Black Panthers became the most well known. Following the practices of the late

Malcolm X the Black Panther Party had strong beliefs in militant revolution, dignity, self-

respect, being an outstanding role model, and someone who sought to bring about positive social

services(Luders, 2005). From the tenets of Maoism the set the role as the vanguard of the

revolution and worked to establish a united front while addressing the capitalist economic system

which they viewed as the cause of racism and embraced Marxism and dialectical materialism.

On April 25, 1967, the first issue of The Black Panther went into distribution and in the

following month, the party marched on the California state capital fully armed in protest to the

state’s attempt to outlaw carrying loaded weapons in public. All members of the Panthers were

arrested in an act of repression of political resistance, this backfires on the state and soon starting

minority workers to take up arms and form new Panther chapters outside the state begins to

explode. In the beginning of 1968 the group sold copies of Mao’s Red Book to university

students as a means to buy shotguns, the group makes the book required reading (, 1999).
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Hoover, who at the time was head of the FBI, begins a program called COINTELPRO

(counterintelligence program) infiltrate and disrupt the unity of revolutionary groups in the

United States. Several groups this program targeted were, Peace and Freedom Party, Brown

Berets, Students for a Democratic Society, SNCC, Cesar Chavez, and others in the farm labor

movement just to name a few(, 1999). To destroy the Panthers, the FBI begins systematic

assassinations killing leading members of the party who they know could not be subverted and

arresting other members followed by psychological warfare. Designed to split the party both

politically and morally using espionage, provocateurs, and chemical warfare.

It was during this time violence against blacks was at an all-time high by the forces of the

police and others who believed that the African American population was getting to the point

where they were a threat to society. In West Oakland a teen by the age of Bobby Hutton was shot

dead by the Oakland Police Department on April six 1968, he was only 17(Luders, 2005). In the

middle of a 90 minute gun battle, after his house was set ablaze and he was forced to run into a

hail of gun fire an unarmed child is dead, this following Dr. King’s assassination just two days

before. It was during this time that King was also rethinking his stance on non-violence and

started to build ties with radical unions. It was two months later to the date that Robert Kennedy,

one of the only politicians sympathetic to the civil rights was assassinated himself. On October

16, of that year two black athletes representing the US in the Mexico City Olympics won the

gold and silver medals after doing so as they approached the podium to receive their medals they

removed from their pockets a black glove and placed it on their hand. In front of a worldwide

audience, they would go on to raise their fist into the air and give the black power salute of a

gloved fist raised into the air(Joseph, 2006). This shocked Olympic officials and enraged

thousands across American, however as the world as a whole this would be a moment of great

triumph for the Black Power movement as a symbol of pride and strength. After several days the
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athletes were stripped of their medals and forced to leave the country, some could see this as a

direct assault on the civil rights movement and more over an attack on any “radical” group at the

time, given the violence at Kent State the next year and all the beatings of protestors of the war,

these were the strange years of the Nixon era.

In conclusion the Civil Rights Movement can be said to have a genesis in Montgomery,

and an omega in Memphis, however this would leave a tremendous amount out and leaving

thousands, if not millions disillusioned and out of the movement they worked so hard to bring

together. One thing all peoples must remember is that in the story of the African American and

civil rights, there is no beginning and there is no end in sight.

Works Cited
Civil Rights Movement Veterans. (1999). Retrieved April 2010, from
http://www.crmvet.org/tim/timhome.htm
August Meier, E. R. (1976, 2002). Along the Color Line: EXPLORATIONS IN THE
BLACK EXPERIENCE. Champaign : University of Illinois Press.
Bois, W. D. (1994). The Souls of Black Folk. New York: Dover Publications Inc.
Jones, A. (2006). Race and the "I have a Dream" Legacy: Exploring Predicators of
Positive Civil Rights Attitudes. Journal of Black Studies, Vol. 37, No. 2, 193-
208.
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Joseph, P. E. (2006). Waiting Till The Midnight Hour. New York: Holt Paperbacks
Henry Holt and Company.
Luders, J. E. (2005). Civil Rights Success and the Politics of Racial Violence. Polity,
Vol. 37 No.1 Fashion for Democracy, 108-129.