During the 1960s, the nation became embroiled in racial conflict that was spawned by the tensions created by poverty and segregation.
As the Civil Rights movement sought to achieve equal rights for African Americans, white resistance often led to trouble. When the Supreme Court, in Brown v. Board of Education (1954), ruled that school segregation was unconstitutional, the process of desegregation brought massive white resistance in the South. The Southern Mani-EEsto, signed by members of Congress, vowed to fight to preserve segregation and the southern way of life.
Angry southerners were furious at what they felt to be the increasing assertiveness of African Americans. One horrifying episode occurred in 1955 when Emmett Till, a 14-year-old black child, was lynched in Money, Mississippi, when he said “Bye, baby” to Carolyn Bryant, a white woman working in her husband’s store. Because he had ignored the racial etiquette of the South, Till was kidnapped at gunpoint by Bryant’s husband and his brother-in-law a few days after the incident. Till’s body was found in the Tallahatchie River with a bullet lodged in his head and evidence of torture. Despite overwhelming evidence against the two white men who lynched Till, they were acquitted of all charges by an all-white jury. They then sold their confession to Look magazine, and gloated over their escape from justice, while Emmett’s mother, unable to allow America to turn away from this horrible crime, had her son’s mangled body displayed in an open casket in Chicago. The lynching of Emmett Till shaped the consciousness of young African-American activists.
When African-American college students pioneered sit-ins during the 1960s as a form of protest, which paved the way for the ereedom rides of 1961, the pace of social change was accelerated by such nonviolent demonstrations. Blacks sitting-in at Woolworth’s in Greensboro, North Carolina, had burning cigarettes pressed into their skin. Freedom riders often found the buses they rode overturned or burned. In the 1963 Birmingham, Alabama, campaign, which demanded the integration of public facilities, guarantees of employment opportunities for black workers, desegregation of schools, and improvement of services in black neighborhoods, demonstrators faced serious violence. The reaction of Eugene “Bull” Connor, the public safety commissioner, to the sit-ins and marches occurring in Birmingham was to arrest all who had participated. Yet the Birmingham conerontation was losing momentum until the “children’s crusade” rallied schoolchildren to march. This tactic infuriated Connor and his officers, who not only arrested the children but also beat them with nightsticks, and set vicious dogs upon them. Firefighters, acting on Connor’s orders, aimed powerful hoses at them, ripping their shirts, cutting their flesh, and lifting them off the ground.
Many of the white business owners were concerned about the escalation of violence. When President John F. Kennedy sent Burke Marshall, the assistant attorney general for civil rights, to negotiate a settlement, white business owners agreed to integrate and hire African-American employees. The following day, Ku Klux Klan members bombed the A. G. Gatson hotel where the Southern Christian Leadership Coneerence (SCLC) had its headquarters. African-American protesters burned cars and buildings and attacked police.
In the summer of 1963, there was a major upsurge in protests across the South with nearly 800 marches, demonstrations, and sit-ins. Ten civil rights protesters were killed and 20,000 arrested, as the white South resisted change. At this point Medgar Evers, the executive secretary for the National Association eor the Advancement oe Colored People (NAACP) in Mississippi, was gunned down in the driveway of his home by a white extremist on June 12, 1963. Evers’s death exhibited the anger and hatred that still existed among some white southerners and the lengths to which they would go to prevent change.
Nashville police officer wielding nightstick holds African-American youth at bay during a civil rights march in Nashville,
Tennessee, 1964. (Library of Congress)
In the summer of 1964, the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) organized the Mississippi Freedom Summer Project. The project, which recruited more than 1,000 northern college students, teachers, artists, and clergy to work in Mississippi, was developed to help African Americans to register to vote in order to break the white monopoly over the ballot box in racist states. Some volunteers encountered harassment, firebombs, arrests, beatings, and even murder. Such was the case when three volunteers—two white New Yorkers, 24-year-old Michael Schwerner and 21-year-old Andrew Goodman, and a black Mississip-pian, 21-year-old James Chaney—disappeared. Arrested on trumped up speeding charges, the three volunteers were driven to a deserted road where three carloads of Klansmen waited. Schwerner and Goodman were shot to death, while Chaney was beaten with chains and then shot. This vicious event focused America’s eyes on white terrorism, which was now plainly evident, while mobilizing and organizing African Americans throughout Mississippi.
Although the Civil Rights Act of 1964 contained provisions for helping African-American voters to register, white resistance in the Deep South had rendered such efforts ineffective. Hoping to push passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which did subsequently end the systematic exclusion of African Americans from southern politics, the SCLC announced plans for a mass march from Selma to Montgomery to begin on Sunday, March 7, 1965. Led by Martin Luther King, Jr., John Lewis, chairman of SNCC, and Hosea Williams, 600 protesters were brutalized by police officers while trying to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge.
In August 1965, frustrations with high unemployment and poverty led to riots in the Watts section of Los Angeles, a primarily black neighborhood. For six days, rioters looted, firebombed, and sniped at police and National Guard troops. When the riots ended, 34 people were dead and hundreds were injured. In the summers of 1966 and 1967, urban riots occurred in the poorer neighborhoods of several northern cities, including Newark and Detroit.
After King was assassinated in April 1968, race riots broke out in more than 100 cities. In the wake of the riots,
President Lyndon B. Johnson appointed a National Commission on Civil Disorders, headed by Otto Kerner, the former governor of Illinois. The Kerner Commission blamed white racism for the outbreaks of violence. In its report, the commission warned, “Our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal.” Inspired by the blunt assertiveness of Malcolm X, many African Americans admired his advocacy of selfsufficiency and black separatism. The Black Panthers preached self-defense against white violence in the form of Black Power, a term coined by SNCC leader Stokely Carmichael.
Further reading: Harvard Sitkoff, The Struggle for Black Equality, 1954-1992 (New York: Hill & Wang, 1993).
—John E. Bibish IV
Raza Unida See La Raza Unida.
World History
