AN ANALYSIS OF AFRICAN AMERICAN, FEMINIST, AND
NATIVE AMERICAN MOVEMENTS IN THE 1960S AND 1970S
BY
SİBEL ERTÜRK
A THESIS SUBMITTED TO THE INSTITUTE FOR GRADUATE
STUDIES IN ECONOMICS AND SOCIAL SCIENCES IN PARTIAL
FULFILLMENT OF REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF
MASTER OF ARTS IN HISTORY
BILKENT UNIVERSITY
THESIS SUPERVISOR
ASSOC. PROF. DR. RUSSELL L. JOHNSON
I certify that I have read this thesis and have found that it is fully adequate, in scope and in quality, as a thesis for the degree of Master of History.
Asst. Prof. Russel L. Johnson Supervisor
I certify that I have read this thesis and have found that it is fully adequate, in scope and in quality, as a thesis for the degree of Mater of History.
Dr. Walter E. Kretchik
Examining Committee Member
I certify that I have read this thesis and have found that it is fully adequate, in scope and in quality, as a thesis for the degree of Master of History
Asst. Prof. Thomas Winter Examining Committee Member
Approval of the Institute of Economics and Social Sciences
Prof. Dr. Kürşat Aydoğan Ditector
iii
ABSTRACT
The purpose of the theses is to illustrate the analogy among African American, feminist, and Native American protest movements of the 1960s and 1970s in the United States, and particularly to examine the division between nonviolent/legal and militant/cultural approaches within each movement. The thesis uses primary and secondary sources to examine to what extent the black protest movement ideologically influenced feminism and Native American activism. Published document collections of the black civil rights movement, women’s movement, and Native American activism of the 1960s and 1970s, memoirs of participants, and movement manifestos comprise the bulk of the primary sources. An examination of the emergence of modern feminism and Native American activism against the backdrop of the black civil rights movement reveals that the resurgence of feminism and Indian activism in the 1960s and 1970s coincided with the black civil rights movement and reflected certain intersections with it as well as divergences from it. The black civil rights movement altered and expanded American politics by providing American women and American Indians with organizational and tactical models, along with ideas, inspiration, and confidence. The protests of these three groups are uniquely important because by protesting for a society in which the quality of human spirit is measured by standards of personal dignity, potential and performance rather than by arbitrary culturally imposed standards of place and role they helped America to live up to its democratic ideals.
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OZET
Tezin amacı, Afrika kökenli Amerikalıların, Amerikalı kadınların, ve yerli Amerikalıların 1960 ve 1970’li yıllardaki protesto hareketlerinin yasal ve kültürel yaklaşımlarını inceleyerek, bu hareketler arasındaki benzerlikleri ortaya çıkarmaktır. Tezde, feministlerin ve yerli Amerikalıların hareketlerinin, Afrika kökenli Amerikalıların protesto hareketlerinden ne derece etkilendiğini incelemek için hem ana, hem de ikincil kaynaklar kullanılmıştır. Afrika kökenli Amerikalıların, Amerikalı kadınların, ve yerli Amerikalıların basılmış belgelerinin koleksiyonları, hareketlerde bizzat yer alanların anıları, ve hareketlerin manifestoları ana kaynakları oluşturmaktadır. Afrika kökenli Amerikalıların hareketleri incelendikten sonra, feministlerin ve yerli Amerikalıların hareketleri incelenince bu hareketlerin birbirleriyle benzerlikleri olabileceği gibi farklılıkları da olabileceği gözlenmektedir. Fakat, en önemlisi, Afrika kökenli Amerikalıların medeni haklarını kazanmak için başlattıkları hareketler kadınlara ve yerli Amerikalılara fikir, ilham, ve güven verip, organizasyon ve taktikler açısından örnekler sunarak, Amerika’nın politikasını değiştirmiştir. Bu üç grubun, toplum tarafından empoze edilen kalıpları ve rolleri aşıp, aktif ve yaratıcı insanların birbirlerine saygı duyduğu bir toplumda yaşamayı amaçlayan hareketleri, Amerika’nın kendi kuruluş ilkelerine – demokratik ideallerine – göre yaşamasına yardımcı olduğu için özellikle önemlidir.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
1. Abbreviations ... 2
2. Introduction ... 5
3. The Civil Rights Movement ...18
4. The Feminist Movement ... 54
5. Native American Rights Movement ... 96
6. Conclusion ...135
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ABBREVIATIONS
AAPRP All-African People’s Revolutionary Party AFL American Federation of Labor
AFN Alaska Federation of Natives AIM American Indian Movement
AIPRC American Indian Policy Review Commission AWSA American Women Suffrage Association BIA Bureau of Indian Affairs
BPP Black Panther Party for Self-Defense
CACSW Citizens’ Advisory Council on the Status of Women CAIN Confederation of American Indian Nations
CERT Council of Energy Resource Tribes CIO Congress of Industrial Organizations CLUW Coalition of Labor Union Women COFO Council of Federated Organizations CORE Congress of Racial Equality
DRUMS Determination of Rights and Unity for Menominee Shareholders EEOC Equal Employment Opportunity Commission
ERA Equal Rights Amendment
ICC Interstate Commerce Commission
IDSCW Interdepartmental Committee on the Status of Women LCFO Lowndes County Freedom Organization
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LDF Legal Defense Fund
MEI Menominee Enterprises, Inc.
MFDP Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party MIA Montgomery Improvement Association
NAACP National Association for the Advancement of Colored People NARF Native American Rights Fund
NAWSA National Women Suffrage Association NBFO National Black Feminist Organization NCAI National Congress of American Indians NCBC National Committee of Black Churchmen NCNP National Conference for a New Politics NIYC National Indian Youth Council
NOW National Organization for Women NTCA National Tribal Chairmen’s Association NUL National Urban League
NWP National Woman’s Party
NWPC National Women’s Political Caucus NWSA National Women’s Studies Association NYRF New York Radical Feminists
NYRW New York Radical Women
OAAU Organization of Afro-American Unity OEO Office of Economic Opportunity
OFCC Office of Federal Contract Compliance RAM Revolutionary Action Movement
RNA Republic of New Africa
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SDS Students for Democratic Society
SNCC Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee UNA United Native Americans
VMLM Voice of the Women’s Liberation Movement WEAL Women’s Equity Action League
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INTRODUCTION
The thesis aims to place into historical perspective certain ideological relationships between recent black activism, contemporary feminism and Native American activism by examining their roots, mutual goals, parallel strategies, common obstacles and various responses. This study is significant because there is not a study yet linking the three movements in a systematic way.1 The thesis primarily focuses on the 1960s and 1970s when massive direct actions dominated race, sex and ethnic protests. By the 1960s and 1970s public protest involved such issues as race, sex, ethnicity, peace, student rights, education, environmental protection, implications of advanced technology, youth and counter culture movements, and consumer protection.2 However, it was primarily the movements of civil rights, women and Native Americans which led to a fundamental reexamination of American attitudes and values. Consequently, the purpose of this study is to illustrate the ideological interconnections among race, sex and ethnic protests, three of the most significant movements of modern times, and particularly to examine the division between legal and cultural approaches within each movement.
In the 1960s and 1970s blacks, women and Native Americans were often set apart from white male protesters in other protest movements. It was not difficult for the white protesters to enter into the dominant social currents after their protest
1 Sara Evans’s Personal Politics: The Roots of Women’s Liberation in the Civil Rights
Movement and the New Left (New York: Vintage Books, 1979) which is primarily a study of the personal rather than the ideological linkages of the civil rights and women’s movements influenced me to study the effect of black civil rights on the movements of women and Indians. Irvin D. Solomon, who primarily argues that women’s own protest history led to contemporary feminism offers useful methodologies in his Feminism and Black Activism (New York: Greenwood Press, 1989).
2 David Farber, ed., The Sixties: From Memory to History (Chapel Hill & London: The University
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commitment was over. Blacks, women and Indians, on the other hand, suffered collective discriminations that prevented their easy entry into mainstream currents. This fact distinguished their activism from the other groups that challenged the nation’s moral and social structure during this time. There was little interaction with other contemporary movements. After all, blacks, women and Indians were challenging historical patterns of discrimination based on negative perceptions of biological differences rather than simply assaulting contemporary philosophical, political and ideological targets.
Race, gender and ethnic protests have appeared as personal and organizational challenges to white male notions that there are inferior beings in society who must be subjugated to their proper place and proper role. The movement became the vehicle by which the powerless sought to achieve entry into the policy-making arena of the society. Blacks, women, and Indians commonly have been defined by historians as analogous powerless groups. Because of their nature, i.e. their race and sex, they are said to have different qualities from the privileged group, white males, which sets the standards for acceptable attitudes, roles and behavior in society.3 Such common awareness of injustice might lead to similar patterns of protest among blacks, women, and Indians. Accordingly, the thesis examines to what extent the black protest movement ideologically influenced feminism and Native American activism.
The civil rights struggle produced a considerable literature focused on the problems of African Americans and African American contributions to America. In the 1940s and 1950s, the tension between actual black life and the ideals of America began to be widely reflected in history. Gunnar Myrdal’s An American Dilemma
3 William H. Chafe, The Unfinished Journey: America since World War II (New York: Oxford
7
(1944) is one of the first books to focus on race relations in the United States.4 Works such as Herbert Shapiro’s White Violence and Black Response, August Meier’s
Negro Thought in America, and Robert H. Brisbane’s The Black Vanguard help us
understand the direct relation between the black experience and the development of race- and color-consciousness, and illustrate that Afro-American history is no longer perceived as adjunctive, but as central to American history.5 The civil rights struggle of the 1960s and 1970s accelerated advances in research by historians. While the first literature about this period was largely written by participants, many of the contributors to the historiography were young scholars of the 1970s and 1980s and thus writing from a fresh perspective. Not surprisingly, one important focus of research has been Martin Luther King, Jr. For example, David J. Garrow’s Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of King, Taylor Branch’s Pulitzer Prize-winning chronicle of the King years, and David L. Lewis’s King offer studies of King’s contribution to the black freedom struggle through an analysis of his nonviolent legal-oriented protest campaigns.6 Casebooks on civil rights such as Simple Justice facilitate a multi-cultural inquiry into anti-discrimination law by presenting civil rights issues as integrated social problems. 7
In terms of cultural-oriented books, William L. Van Deburg’s New Day in
Babylon can be cited as the most comprehensive account of the rise and fall of
the Black Power movement and of its dramatic transformation of both African
4 Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy (New
Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 1944).
5 Herbert Shapiro, White Violence and Black Response: From Reconstruction to
Montgomery (Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press, 1988); August Meier, Negro Thought in America: Racial Ideologies in the Age of Booker T. Washington, 1880-1915 (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1988); Robert H. Brisbane, The Black Vanguard: Origins of the Negro Social Revolution, 1990-1960 (Valley Forge: Judson Press, 1970).
6 David J. Garrow, Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr. ad the Southern Christian
Leadership Conference (London: Jonathan Cape Ltd., 1988); Taylor Branch, Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954-63 (New York: Simon & Schuster Inc., 1985); James A. Colaiaco, Martin Luther King, Jr.: Apostle of Militant Nonviolence (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1988); David L. Lewis, King: A Biography (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1978).
7 Richard Kluger, Simple Justice: The History of Brown v. Board of Education and Black
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American and the American culture.8 As Van Deburg illustrates, as the clarification of black identity and consciousness assumed an urgency, the focus centered on the continuity of the black experience despite its sharp break – the forced removal from African homes and subsequent enslavement. Accordingly, cultural-oriented works focuses on such topics as the pan-African movement and the Afro-centric interpretation.
Similar to African American history, women’s history began as an effort to remedy the absence of women from historical accounts. This compensatory history discovered and celebrated outstanding women of the past. After the success of that endeavor, women’s history began to deal not only with outstanding persons but with various women of different races, classes, nations, and religions. The academic field of women’s studies, well established since the 1970s, focused on that wider concept of women.9 During this period, women’s history dealt with the “cult of true womanhood” and “domesticity,” both seen as cultural, male-oriented models for defining women and their roles. Some women’s historians, influenced to some degree by Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, argued that American women’s history had to be understood not only by way of events but through an ideology as well.10 It produced calls for widening women’s history to gender studies. For instance, Rosalind Rosenberg, in Beyond Separate
Spheres, has located the beginnings of modern studies of sex differences in the
Progressive Era. She argues that many sex differences were the result of socialization, not biology.11 That approach integrated women’s history more effectively into the whole historiography and made it a more useful instrument in
8 William L. Van Deburg, New Day in Babylon: The Black Power Movement and American
Culture, 1965-1975 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1992).
9 Linda Kerber, Toward an Intellectual History of Women: Essays (Chapel Hill: University of
North Carolina Press, 1997), pp. 162-167; Barbara Welter, “The True Cult of Womanhood: 1820-1860”, American Quarterly. Vol. 18, No.2, Part I. (Summer, 1996): pp. 151-171.
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the struggle for women’s emancipation. In Century of Struggle (1975), Eleanor Flexner surveys women’s activism throughout the twentieth century.12 For Personal Politics: The Roots of Women’s Liberation in the Civil Rights Movement and the New Left, which is the only personal study linking the civil rights
movement and women’s activism on the base of research, Sara Evans interviewed dozens of the central figures in the movement. These interviews and her own personal experience provide valuable information on how the political stance of women was shaped by their disillusionment in the civil rights movement.13 Jo Freeman’s The Politics of Women’s Liberation, and Alice Echols’s
Daring to be Bad are important contributions to the writing of women’s history
which explore women’s liberation from its break with the coalition of leftist activist groups of the 1960s to its abandonment of radicalism and separatism in the 1970s.14 Casebooks such as Justice and Gender provide a comprehensive investigation of gender and the law in the United States.15
Similar to African American and women’s historiography, in the widening civil rights struggle, Native Americans strove for the recognition of pre-Columbian America and Americans as well as their sufferings during the post-Columbian settling of the continent. One of the earliest native scholars who focused on Indian history, culture, and contemporary life was D’Arcy McNickle, who wrote They
Came Here First, which dealt with migrations, laws, invasion, war, trade,
colonialism, expansion, reservations, allotment, and self-determination.16 Vine
11 Rosalind Rosenberg, “Beyond Separate Spheres: Intellectual Roots of Modern
Feminism”, The Journal of American History. Vol. 69, No. 4. (March, 1983): pp. 998-999.
12 Eleanor Flexner, Century of Struggle: The Women’s Rights Movement in the United
States (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1975).
13 Evans, Personal Politics.
14 Jo Freeman, The Politics of Women’s Liberation (New York: David McKay Company, Inc.,
1975); Alice Echols, Daring to be Bad: Radical Feminism in America, 1965-1975 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989).
15 Deborah L. Rhode, Justice and Gender: Sex Discrimination and the Law (Massachusetts:
Harvard University Press, 1991).
16 D’Arcy McNickle, They Came Here First: The Epic of the American Indian (New York: J.
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Deloria, Jr., of the Standing Rock Sioux, is one of the leading scholars in Native American studies. His book, Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto, challenges stereotypes and scholars dealing with native culture and history. He wrote other books, including Behind the Trail of Broken Treaties, and American
Indian Policy in the Twentieth Century.17 Indians also reflected their history through literature. Although Native Americans offered some fiction before the 1960s, the era of native activism led to a wealth of books that has grown rapidly since 1968 when N. Scott Momaday published his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel,
House Made of Dawn.18 Momaday’s work emphasizes the struggles of
contemporary native people to find themselves through tribal traditions, including stories, imagination, creativity, and ceremony. James S. Olson and Raymond Wilson’s Native Americans in the Twentieth Century, and Peter Iverson’s “We Are
Still Here” present comprehensive surveys of Native American history from the
1890s to the present.19 Alvin M. Josephy, Jr., in his Now That the Buffalo has
Gone, presents major aspects of contemporary Indian affairs by reviewing the
particular histories of seven Indian tribes.20 Felix S. Cohen’s Handbook of Federal Indian Law, a forty-two volume collection of federal laws and treaties, is a real contribution to American Indian historiography.21 Clifford E. Trafzer’s As Long As
the Grass Shall Grow and Rivers Flow, and Joane Nagel’s American Indian Ethnic Renewal, which present Native voices telling their own stories of conflict,
resistance and survival, provide valuable information about several historical
17 Vine Deloria, Jr., Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto (Norman: University of
Oklahoma Press, 1988), Behind the Trail of Broken Treaties (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1985), American Indian Policy in the Twentieth Century (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1985).
18 N. Scott Momaday, House Made of Dawn (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1996). 19 James S. Olson and Raymond Wilson, Native Americans in the Twentieth Century
(Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1984); Peter Iverson, “We Are Still Here”: American Indians in the Twentieth Century (Illinois: Harlan Davidson, Inc., 1998).
20 Alvin M. Josephy, Jr., Now That the Buffalo Has Gone: A Study of Today’s American
Indians (Oklahoma: University of Oklahoma Press, 1984).
21 Felix S. Cohen, Felix S. Cohen’s Handbook of Federal Indian Law (Charlottesville: Michie:
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forces which created an urban Indian population base, a reservation and urban Indian organizational infrastructure, and a broad cultural climate of ethnic pride and militancy.22
Although the literature on the three movements is voluminous, no single study examines the possible parallels between race, sex and ethnic protests. The thesis uncovers two protest models that deal with the similar obstacles, strategies, tactics and goals of race, sex and ethnic protests. Black, female, and Indian assimilationists adopted legal-oriented approaches to social change, while black, female, and Indian separatists emphasized culturally-oriented protest. The first of the two models, the legal-traditional approach, assumes that a large number of protesters sought primarily to create a more egalitarian society with full integration. This group did not seek to overturn society, but rather to reform it through traditional legal measures so that blacks, women and Indians may participate equally. Unlike the legalists, the cultural-nationalists rejected legal assimilation in favor of radical nontraditional alternative arrangements that stress self-definition and intragroup strength practiced apart from the dominant group.
At the same time, not all groups fit the neat delineation of legal vs. cultural orientation. Leading Native American activists, for example, were both reformist and radical since they sought legal change while at the same time challenging cultural norms like assimilation. Accordingly, this category must be seen in the light of the efforts to understand the developments of black activism, feminism and Indian activism, not to lock each into rigid ideological barriers. Allegiances shifted among protesters themselves, and it is therefore difficult to establish the exact level of participation in each of the two models in terms of numbers and intensity. Moreover, even though some protesters’ enthusiasms shifted from one approach
22 Clifford E. Trafzer, As Long As The Grass Shall Grow and Rivers Flow: A History of
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to another, the transition was not necessarily sequential, as categories tended to connect or overlap in particular ways over time and space. Civil rights, feminist and Indian activists adopted these models from their long protest histories.
Discontent with patriarchal authority had fostered the American Revolution. And, the same force stimulated modern activism. However, modern black activism particularly has its ideological roots in the 1920s. In the post-World War I period race pride and spirit showed itself in the mass movement of Marcus Garvey and the literary achievements of the Harlem Renaissance. Through the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), Afro-Americans increased their efforts to end the “color line” during the inter-war period. With the changing conditions of the early 1940s, some blacks departed from the traditional legal lobbying tactics of the NAACP and began to realize more dramatic actions, the nonviolent, direct-action and mass protest strategies of the Congress of Racial Equality. With the Supreme Court’s Brown school desegregation decision in the mid-1950s, many blacks felt that at last the legal struggle of the NAACP had proved successful. But it quickly became apparent that the federal government’s reluctance to enforce Brown and similar decisions would allow white America’s segregation policies to continue. Through the middle and late 1950s segregation increased. This, in turn, increased feelings of social injustice and new protests emerged.23
Black struggles for equality emerged with the Montgomery, Alabama, bus boycott in 1955. Innovative organizations began to adopt new protest models and spawned new personal leadership, for instance that of Martin Luther King, Jr., who became an internationally recognized civil rights leader. King worked primarily through the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) until the early
Ethnic Renewal: Red Power and the Resurgence of Identity and Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996).
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1960s, at which time younger and more impatient people carried the civil rights movement into new phases. The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and the Congress of Racial Equality used conflict methods of protest in place of the NAACP and SCLC’s legal consensus model. But in the face of these new militant challenges, the NAACP and SCLC did not give up their traditional organizational leadership in the quest for social equality. They continued to press strongly for legislation and precedent-setting court decisions and to supply legal counsel and financial backing for direct action.24
Therefore, into the mid-1960s black protest goals were aimed for the most part not at overturning the fundamental structure of racist society, but rather at altering its legal basis. As a result, despite decades of struggles and successes, most Afro-Americans remained economically, educationally, and politically marginal to the dominant white society. Since many Afro-Americans showed that they were not happy with their second-class status, it was predictable that a new militancy would emerge. The new movement appeared as the Black Power movement, which symbolized the transition from legal-oriented to cultural-oriented protest.
Black Power stressed self-defense, self-definition and self-determination. Stokely Carmichael and Charles V. Hamilton stated these goals in Black Power. “Our basic need is to reclaim our history and our identity from what must be called cultural terrorism, from the depredation of self-justifying white guilt. We shall have to struggle for the right to create our own terms through which to define ourselves and our relationship to the society, and to have these terms recognized.”25 For blacks this new focus called for cultural autonomy as well as increased militancy
23 Shapiro, White Violence and Black Response, pp. 101-407; Brisbane, The Black
Vanguard.
24 Garrow, Bearing the Cross, pp. 11-172; Branch, Parting the Waters.
25 Stokely Carmichael and Charles V. Hamilton, Black Power: The Politics of Liberation in
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and departures from past legal-oriented coalition policies. Black Power stressed nationalistic militancy that reflected earlier approaches – especially those of Marcus Garvey, the Nation of Islam and Malcolm X. Malcolm X was the most visible spokesperson for the Nation of Islam during the early 1960s. When he proclaimed Black America’s right to self-defense “by any means necessary”, disavowed what he termed the “disarming philosophy of non-violence”, and labeled the white liberal allies of the civil rights movement deceivers and hypocrites, many black Americans agreed.26 When Malcolm X spoke of the need for black unity and self-determination, for community control and the internationalization of the black struggle, he foreshadowed later, more fully developed and institutionalized Black Power sentiment.
Black Power influenced the direction of protest thought in contemporary America by offering organizational and tactical models, ideas, inspiration, and confidence to those who wished to challenge traditional assumptions of the proper place and role of American subgroups. It taught that society needed structural and social change as well as legal change. By attacking various institutional inequalities, Black Power helped to influence much of the protest thought of the late 1960s and 1970s that came to characterize the more militant wings of other cultural-oriented movements, in particular radical women and radical Indians.
It seems that the growing impact of black protest through the 1960s helped in many essential ways to generate the emergence of other social protests of the era, both by providing models for political activity and legal goals and by mobilizing a new consciousness against restraining concepts of proper place and role. Particularly representative of new social commitments in the 1960s were the reemerging women’s movement, which attacked the notion that women’s achievements should be limited to motherhood and corollary pursuits, and Indian
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activism, which attacked assimilation and dissolution and fought for self-determination. However, to assume that the women’s rights movement and Native American movement derived directly from the black civil rights movement would be totally to neglect women and Indians’ own rich protest histories.
While civil rights in the early 1960s created a new confidence that certain protest ideologies could produce change, there were equally important women and Indian-oriented events occurring simultaneously that helped to revive feminism and Indian activism. In terms of the women’s movement, lack of federal initiative in pressing for strict enforcement for redress of sexual discrimination, publication of feminist books, and a sense of unfulfillment and denial of their own potential in the civil rights movement encouraged women to speak out against sexist practices. This, in turn, created a renewed interest among women in collective identity, their public prospects and their private aspirations. As an extension of the earlier legal lobbying model of the suffragists, the National Organization for Women represented the legal approach. It stressed women’s legal rights and petitioned federal and state governments for meaningful actions in this area. On the other hand, radical women rejected the legal focus in favor of cultural-based protest against women’s oppression. They took organizing skills and ideological lessons learned in the civil rights movement and used them for feminist purposes. Radical feminists, like black nationalists, rejected the notion that removal of legal and political obstacles would create an egalitarian society. By 1970 radical women had created numerous organizations, and groups like Redstockings, New York Radical Women and the Feminists became the more visible elements of the cultural wing. Radical women, like black radicals, rejected compromise politics. Some even chose to reject heterosexual living patterns and favored alternative arrangements.
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For Native Americans, funding of federal Indian programs, demographic changes, paternalism and racism of federal institutions, and denial of Indian ethnicity helped to revive Indian activism. The legal faction included the National Congress of American Indians, and tribally organized groups such as the National Tribal Chairmen’s Association, and the Native American Rights Fund. These organizations adopted the black civil rights tactics of lobbying, petitioning, and litigating. However, their efforts to reverse termination policies predated the civil rights era.27 Meanwhile, whereas black radicals had called for Black Power and received support from young Afro-Americans, so Native American radicals called for Red Power and had their own separatist ideas. Red Power stood in contrast to the more conservative, legal-oriented groups representing Indian interests. The cultural-oriented faction involved such radical organizations as the National Indian Youth Council and American Indian Movement. Despite the fact that the civil rights movement and American Indian activists had not much contact and the fact that the problems of American Indians and African Americans differed, the civil rights movement was very important for the reemergence of Indian activism. Native American activists borrowed organizational forms, rhetoric, and tactics from civil rights, but changed them according to their needs, targets, and locations. It may be concluded that the structure, style and rhetoric of black radicalism, radical feminism and Indian activism have certain similarities, but the energy, leadership and direction of each movement sprang largely from within.
The thesis, then, deals with how the movements of black civil rights, women and Indians have been shaped by two distinct ideological approaches: the legal and the cultural. Historians need to pay greater attention to the historical interrelatedness of events, society, and the possibility of bettering society. It
27 The effort to detribalize and assimilate the Indians began with the Dawes Act of 1887 and
17
seemed useful to develop a theory of ideological interaction as an interconnection between the three groups in order to examine the parallels and the extent of shared protest experiences. The following chapters focus on the orientations of black activism, feminism and Indian activism in the 1960s and 1970s with the intent of examining more carefully the contemporary ideological relationship between black civil rights and feminism and Indian activism. The chapters continue to compare and contrast the 1960s and 1970s ideological thrust of the three movements along legal and cultural lines. Hopefully, the thesis will further historians’ understanding of race, sex, and ethnic protest. 28
28 Much of the evidence comes from secondary literature, but important primary sources
include published document collections, memoirs of participants, movement manifestos, among other sources. For instance, Judith Clavir Albert and Stewart Edward Albert, in The Sixties Papers: Documents of a Rebellious Decade (New York: Praeger, 1984), collect documents from the civil rights, anti-war, and women’s movement of the 1960s and 1970s. William L. Van Deburg’s Modern Black Nationalism: From Marcus Garvey to Louis Farrakhan (New York: New York University Press, 1997) presents a collection of invaluable documents, speeches, and testimonies that trace the development of black nationalism. SNCC volunteer Cleveland Sellers’s memoir The River of No Return: The Autobiography of a Black Militant and the Life and Death of SNCC (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1990) provides an eyewitness report of the strategies and conflicts among black activists of the 1960s. Bruce Perry’s Malcolm X: The Last Speeches (New York: Pathfinder, 1989) presents six speeches and interviews with Malcolm X, the most visible spokesperson for Afro-Americans’ right to self-defense “by any means necessary.” Malcolm X’s radical philosophies can also be seen in Alex Haley’s The Autobiography of Malcolm X (New York: Ballantine Books, 1973), several volumes of collected speeches, and spoken word record albums. Similarly, activist Stokely Carmichael and Charles V. Hamilton’s statements and urgent call for a process of political modernization are reflected in their Black Power: The Politics of Liberation in America (New York: Vintage Books, 1967). Betty Friedan’s It Changed My Life: Writings on the Women’s Movement (New York: Random House, 1976), Robin Morgan’s The Word of A Woman: Feminist Dispatches (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1994), and Sheila Ruth’s Issues in Feminism (Mountain View: Maxfield Publishing Company, 1995) present many interviews and early feminist publications, and the writers share their own experience in the women’s liberation movement. Casebooks such as Roy L. Brooks, Gilbert P. Carrasco and Gordon A. Martin, Jr.’s Civil Rights Litigation: Cases and Perspectives (Durham, North Carolina: Carolina Academic Press, 1995), Leslie Friedman Goldstein’s Contemporary Cases in Women’s Rights (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1994), Winston E. Langley and Vivian C. Fox’s Women’s Rights in the United States: A Documentary History (Westport, Connecticut: Praeger, 1998), and Francis Paul Prucha’s Documents of United States Indian Policy (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1990) provide essential historical documents on significant formulations of policy in the conduct of the affairs of blacks, women, and Indians by the United States government.
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CHAPTER I
THE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT
This chapter will review the legal and cultural factions of black activism in order to facilitate discussion of common ideological influences and shared protest characteristics among the black civil rights movement, feminist activism, and Native American activism in later chapters. During the 1960s and 1970s, while the legal faction called for nonviolent legal action within the democratic system to transform the social structure of the country, the cultural faction supported a violent, cultural- oriented movement and the creation of two separate societies – one black, one white. It can be argued that the cultural faction, which produced various gains in psychological and cultural empowerment, complemented the legal faction, which was successful in reaching its goals of desegregation and voting rights.
Events in the second half of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century significantly affected black people and provided the necessary conditions for the civil rights movement. Emancipation (1863) and the Reconstruction period (1867-1877) provided legal freedom but left many blacks destitute. Intimidation and an unequal system maintained economic bondage. The Ku Klux Klan, a terrorist group, arose during Reconstruction to preserve white supremacy by intimidating blacks who sought to exercise their political rights. By the 1890s, the southern states had begun to pass Black Codes, laws to disfranchise blacks, segregate them in all areas of life, and relegate them to a subservient status. At the turn of the century, Jim Crow laws segregated many schools, railroad cars, hotels, and hospitals. Poll taxes and other devices
19
disfranchised blacks.1 Blacks could not hope for support from the courts. In the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision, the Supreme Court upheld “separate but equal” facilities for blacks and whites.2 White violence created such an atmosphere of terror that protest followed the slave pattern of indirection, secrecy, and withdrawal into a separate black world. In spite of their powerless position, blacks often found ways of resisting white domination – ranging from playing the Sambo type of a happy, carefree, irresponsible Afro-American or the “Uncle Tom”, who seemed to have faith in white allies and the efficacy of civil rights legislation, to quiet acts of subversion and sabotage.
By the end of the nineteenth century, the main spokesperson for the race was the accommodationist leader Booker T. Washington, who supported gradual change rather than political action. Washington advised adjustment to the biracial situation and to disfranchisement. He stressed self-help, racial solidarity, economic accumulation, and industrial education. His conciliatory stance was based on the belief that blacks should take responsibility for their own advancement. The most prominent critic of Washington’s accommodationist policies was the black progressive W. E. B. Du Bois. By 1900, Du Bois argued that until blacks gained their full political rights, democracy would never be theirs. In place of accommodation and programs for industrial arts, Du Bois emphasized political power, civil rights, and education. He brought black leaders together to form the Niagara Movement, an important precursor of the National Association for the Advancement of the Colored People (NAACP) and the National Urban League (NUL).3
1 August Meier, Negro Thought in America (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press,
1988), pp. 3-16; Richard Kluger, Simple Justice: The History of Brown v. Board of Education and Black America’s Struggle for Equality (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1975), pp. 62-103.
2 Kluger, Simple Justice, pp. 90-102.
3 NAACP and NUL’s strategies such as working within the American democratic framework
20
Since neither Du Bois nor Washington could stop discrimination, lynching and the loss of voting rights in such an unjust environment, some African Americans saw the need for a cultural-oriented, nationalist, and separatist movement. Jamaican secessionist Marcus Garvey founded the Universal Negro Improvement Association in 1914 during the heightened white racism of the early twentieth century. Garvey directly opposed the white system by stressing the beauty of blackness, black pride, self-esteem, and Pan-Africanism. Similar sentiments would resurface when disappointments with the achievements of the 1960s civil rights movement turned into support for black nationalism. Moreover, mass migration to northern cities in the twentieth century provided a stronger base for dealing with racism. The city became the center of black intellectual thought and cultural development. It created the possibility of a northern support system for the southern-based civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. The Harlem Renaissance, led by black poets like Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, and Claude McKay, provided a creative outburst of talent and nationalism. Another cultural renaissance would mark the transition from the civil rights movement to the black power movement in the 1960s.4
World War II fostered a reborn spirit of legal protest to bring white racial ideology into conformity with America’s democratic ideology. The legal wing of black activism undertook both legal action, confined to courthouses and legislative chambers, and nonviolent direct action, filling the streets with masses of nonviolent marchers exercising the right to protest for constitutional goals. Massive nonviolent direct action exposed racist brutality, pressured the federal government to enforce civil rights, and awakened the conscience of the nation to see the injustices in the society.
4 William L. Van Deburg, ed., Modern Black Nationalism: From Marcus Garvey to Louis
21
Until the mid-1950s, the battle for civil rights in the South was led by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), founded in 1909. The NAACP focused on public education, legislative lobbying and court action to attain equality for blacks. The NAACP’s tax-exempt Legal Defense and Education Fund, later known as the Inc. Fund, became one of the nation’s most respected legal machines. Through the 1950s the Inc. Fund participated directly in many important Supreme Court civil rights decisions. The greatest NAACP achievement was the 1954 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of
Education, declaring “separate but equal” racial segregation in public schools
unconstitutional; the Court ruled that separate schools were inherently unequal. However, after the decision, public schools and accommodations remained segregated as the Southern states embarked on a campaign of “massive resistance”. White Citizens’ Councils were instituted in the South to resist integration, and the Ku Klux Klan became more active. The legal strategy of the NAACP was unable to cope with such defiance. Moreover, between 1956 and 1959, the Southern states attacked the NAACP, either outlawing it, as in Alabama, or passing laws and issuing injunctions to weaken its operation.5
Further, the Supreme Court weakened the effectiveness of the Brown decision. It ruled on May 31, 1955 that desegregation should merely be carried out “with all deliberate speed.” This ruling, known as Brown II, let Southern segregationists respond with a policy of deliberate delay and evasion.6 Therefore, blacks lost confidence in legislation and legal action to achieve full citizenship. A more active method was needed, something which would supplement the moderate legalist strategy of the NAACP, compel the Southern states to comply with the law,
Shapiro, White Violence and Black Response: From Reconstruction to Montgomery (Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press, 1988), pp. 161-169.
5 Kluger, Simple Justice, 761-764, 776-791, 902-974; James Colaiaco, Martin Luther
King, Jr.: Apostle of Militant Nonviolence (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1988), pp. 20-21.
22
and persuade the President and Congress to take a more active role in support of civil rights. This method, initiated in the Montgomery Bus Boycott, was mass, nonviolent direct action. Montgomery expanded the arena of black protest from the courts and legislatures to the streets. Thereafter, the branch of the movement led by Martin Luther King, Jr. expanded in the form of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), created in 1957 to coordinate nonviolent protest activities in the South.7 The nonviolent method revolutionized race relations in the South and affected the politics of the whole nation.
The Montgomery protest is a turning point in the civil rights movement. On December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks, a member of the NAACP, was arrested for violating the city’s segregated transportation ordinance by refusing to give her bus seat to a white man. To protest the arrest of Rosa Parks, black activists boycotted the Montgomery city buses. The Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA), which directed the protests, filed a lawsuit, Browder v. Gayle. It requested that segregation on buses not only in Montgomery, but also in the entire state of Alabama be declared unconstitutional as a violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution. Responding to MIA’s federal suit, the City Commission undertook legal action of its own. On February 21, King and other leaders of the boycott were indicted by a Montgomery County grand jury for violating an obscure 1921 Alabama anti-boycott statute. But this tactic failed to crush the boycott.
Afro-Americans appeared to have gained a victory when the Montgomery City Lines, acting on orders from their Chicago parent company, the National City Lines, decided to desegregate buses on 23 April. But the order was repealed on 9 May, when the City Commission secured a state court injunction prohibiting
7 David J. Garrow, Bearing The Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Southern Christian
23
desegregation of the buses. Meanwhile arguments in the Browder v. Gayle case concluded in the U.S. District Court. On June 4, 1956, the protest proved successful when bus segregation in Montgomery was declared unconstitutional by a special three judge panel. On December 20, the Supreme Court’s bus integration order became legally effective in Montgomery. Scattered white resistance continued, however; for example, in late December Ku Klux Klan members fired at integrated buses in Montgomery. 8
The Montgomery bus boycott initiated the era of mass nonviolent protest for civil rights in the South. For the first time, an entire black community had resisted Jim Crow successfully. In 1956, bus boycotts were organized in Birmingham and Mobile, Alabama, and Tallahassee, Florida; many other southern cities desegregated their buses voluntarily, without court intervention.9 The civil rights movement could not have ended legalized segregation in the South without the combined action of nonviolent protest and litigation.
On May 17, 1957, the first large civil rights demonstration, the Prayer Pilgrimage to Washington, helped to get support for the Eisenhower Administration’s proposed civil rights legislation. Later that year, Congress passed the first major civil rights law since the Reconstruction era. The Civil Rights Act of 1957 created the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, established a Civil Rights Division in the Justice Department and empowered the federal government to obtain injunctions preventing interference with the right to vote. Still, the failure of the 1957 Civil Rights Act to protect black voting rights led the Eisenhower Administration to propose the Civil Rights Act of 1960, which authorized federal district courts to appoint voting referees to protect the right to vote in areas where it was denied or prevented by local officials. The act also authorized the Department
8 David L. Lewis, King: A Biography (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1978), pp. 44-86. 9 Colaiaco, Martin Luther King, Jr., p. 18.
24
of Justice to file suits in defense of voting rights. While the Civil Rights Acts of 1957 and 1960 represented progress, this legislation was still insufficient to guarantee the right to vote for black Americans and did not overcome the problems of segregated schools and public accommodations.10
By 1960 the legal faction of the civil rights movement focused on a massive nonviolent assault on segregation, using the tactics of sit-ins, mass marches and civil disobedience. On February 1, 1960, four black students of North Carolina Agricultural and Technical College in Greensboro refused to leave a whites only lunch counter at Woolworth’s department store, and the sit-in movement, a milestone in the struggle for black equality, was born. The students' arrest and removal from the whites only lunch counter at Woolworth’s led other student protesters to stage sit-ins in Southern states. Sit-ins continued to spread in the South, and by the end of 1961 nearly two hundred cities in the South had begun to desegregate. The success of nonviolent mass actions soon challenged the legal oriented wing of the movement, especially the NAACP and King factions. The idea of changing laws began to give way to an ideology of changing attitudes and practices. Most of the protests were supported by SCLC affiliates, local CORE chapters and NAACP Youth Councils. Protests began to be conducted not only at lunch counters, but also at department stores, libraries, supermarkets, theatres and hotels.11
In particular, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), which began under SCLC and King sponsorship in 1960, underwent an important transformation. It quickly adopted the new “eyeball to eyeball” or “putting your body
10 Roy L. Brooks, Civil Rights Litigation: Cases and Perspectives (Durham, North Carolina:
Carolina Academic Press, 1995), p. 518.
11 Colaiaco, Martin Luther King, 29-31; Rhoda Lois Blumberg, Civil Rights: The 1960s
25
on the line” tactics of confrontation and possible arrest.12 By 1966 both CORE and SNCC had undergone a radical ideological evolution from demands for integration to an emphasis on black nationalism. Their protest experiences led organizations like SNCC and CORE away from the established NAACP legal model, which had long stressed assimilation within the framework of traditional American goals and concepts, to new models of activism and rejection.
After John F. Kennedy took office as president in 1961, King published an article in The Nation, “Equality Now”, urging the new president to take a “radically new approach to the question of civil rights” by sponsoring far-reaching legislation and issuing executive orders to end racial discrimination.13 However, Kennedy hoped that stronger enforcement of the current civil rights acts of 1957 and 1960 would be sufficient to maintain the confidence of black voters without risking the loss of his political support in Congress. In place of new civil rights legislation, Kennedy decided to pursue a policy that would guarantee blacks the right to register and vote. The Administration argued that a massive voter registration campaign would direct the attention of blacks away from the protests and increase the number of Democratic voters for the next election. To educate blacks in understanding the electoral process, the Administration sponsored a Voter Education Project.14
But many blacks became disappointed with Kennedy’s actions. During its first two years, the Administration failed to protect civil rights in the South. Even though in November 1962 the President issued an executive order banning discrimination in federally-funded housing, the order was so poorly implemented that it had minimal effect. Even the Voter Education Project was a disappointment.
12 Judith Clavir and Stewart Edward Albert, The Sixties Papers: Documents of a Rebellious
Decade (New York: Praeger, 1984), 8; Huey P. Newton, Revolutionary Suicide ( New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1973), p. 122.
26
Although the Justice Department initiated some voting rights suits, it was hampered by weaknesses in the Civil Rights Acts of 1957 and 1960. By 1964, only 40 percent of the black population of voting age in the South was qualified to vote, as compared with 70 percent of whites.15
The weaknesses in the Kennedy Administration‘s civil rights policy were first exposed by the Freedom Rides of 1961. After becoming CORE’s national director, James Farmer announced a plan to test Southern compliance with a December 1960 United States Supreme Court decision, Boynton v. Virginia, prohibiting segregation in interstate transportation facilities. In May 1961, thirteen Freedom Riders got on two buses, a Greyhound and a Trailways, in Washington, D.C. and began a trip to challenge segregation in the South. New Orleans was their destination. The Freedom Riders tried to challenge segregation in terminal restaurants, restrooms, and waiting rooms, exposing the defiance of federal law in the South. The Riders accepted the legal penalty of imprisonment for their civil disobedience. The Freedom Rides went beyond the nonviolent strategy pursued by the sit-ins. They not only disrupted public order in the South but also compelled the federal government to fulfill its responsibility to protect citizens attempting to exercise their civil rights. On May 29, 1961 Kennedy formally petitioned the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC) to act against segregation in interstate bus terminals; on September 22, the ICC issued an order banning segregation in both interstate carriers and terminal facilities.16
The Freedom Rides inspired the Southern nonviolent protest movement. Moreover, the Rides gave an important strategic lesson to King and the SCLC. In order to arouse public sympathy sufficient to pressure the federal government to
14 Harris Wofford, Of Kennedys and Kings: Making Sense of the Sixties (Pittsburgh:
University of Pittsburgh Press, 1992),159; Colaiaco, Martin Luther King, Jr., p. 33.
15 Colaiaco, Martin Luther King. Jr., p. 33.
16 Garrow, Bearing the Cross, pp. 154-172; Kluger, Simple Justice, p. 952; Colaiaco,
27
enforce civil rights in the states and localities, white racists had to be provoked to use violence against nonviolent protesters. This lesson was applied in 1962, when James Meredith attempted to become the first black man to enter the University of Mississippi. After Mississippi Governor Ross Barnett defied a federal injunction by preventing Meredith’s enrolment, President Kennedy sent federal marshals to the University to enforce the court order. When they were rebuffed by a rioting white mob, the President was compelled to send federal troops and National Guardsmen. On October 1, 1962, James Meredith registered as a student at the University of Mississippi.17 Thereafter, provoking a crisis to arouse sympathy and force the federal government to take action in support of civil rights became a part of the strategy of nonviolent direct action.
The first test of SCLC’s capacity for nonviolent action occurred in Albany, Georgia, in 1962. In 1961, most Albany blacks were not registered to vote, and the city’s public facilities were completely segregated. In late 1961, Albany blacks engaged in massive nonviolent protests, disrupting civil order for a year. The goal of the movement was to overturn segregation not only in bus stations and lunch counters but in all public facilities in the city. By the end of 1962, however, the movement failed to reach its goal of complete desegregation. Although the city complied with the ICC ruling and desegregated its bus terminals, the remaining public facilities were closed or kept segregated after being sold to a group of Albany businessmen. There were no efforts to hire black bus drivers, policemen or sales clerks, and department store lunch counters remained segregated. Conditions remained the same until the enactment of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.18
17 Blumberg, Civil Rights: The 1960s Freedom Struggle, pp. 92-117. 18 Garrow, Bearing the Cross, pp. 176-216.
28
However, the Albany campaign had some positive results. It showed that blacks in the South could be united for nonviolent protest. The Albany protests mobilized more blacks than any action since the Montgomery bus boycott. After Albany, thousands of blacks were added to the voter registration rolls.19 As a test of the method of nonviolent direct action against racism, Albany also provided valuable strategic lessons for the SCLC. King explained that the boycott of downtown stores had been an effective but limited tactic because the movement’s direct action methods had not been combined with a boycott so as to inflict a maximum penalty on the business leaders. King argued that nonviolent direct action would be more effective if concentrated against one aspect of the segregationist system.20
A more unambiguous triumph for nonviolent direct action was the Birmingham campaign. In 1963, protesters resisted segregation by creating disorder that forced the business community to make significant concessions to black citizens and by attracting national support for strong civil rights legislation. Finally, the Kennedy Administration had been persuaded to intervene actively in support of civil rights.21 Writing on “The Meaning of Birmingham”, activist Bayard Rustin concluded that the campaign was a turning point in the black struggle for equality. Before Birmingham blacks had fought for limited civil rights goals, such as desegregation of public accommodations and integrated schools. But now blacks had broadened their goals and were “demanding social, political, and economic changes.”22
During the summer of 1963, nonviolent protests increased with the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom on August 28, the largest mass demonstration in the history of civil rights. The March was planned by black
19 Ibid., pp. 226-227. 20 Ibid., pp. 226-227.
29
leaders, such as King, A. Philip Randolph, Roy Wilkins of the NAACP, James Farmer of CORE, John Lewis of SNCC and Whitney Young of the National Urban League, to show mass support for a new Civil Rights Bill.23 Although King believed that the March got national support for the Civil Rights Bill, many young black militants accused its leaders of selling out to the racist system.24 Despite the criticisms, the March on Washington was an important point in the black freedom struggle.
In January 1964 the states ratified the 24th Amendment outlawing the poll tax in federal elections, and, in July, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was finally passed. The latter came in response to movement pressures, police terrorism in Birmingham in 1963, the 1963 March on Washington, the final nonviolent campaign against segregated public accommodations in the South by the SCLC in the spring of 1964 at St. Augustine, Florida, and pressure from President Lyndon B. Johnson. The Act prohibited discrimination in the use of federal funds and in places of public accommodation and gave additional powers to the Civil Rights Commission. It also established an Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) to eliminate unlawful employment practices.25 Most important, however, is the fact that civil rights laws were enforced only after the federal government was compelled to do so by a crisis provoked by the nonviolent masses on the march. Moreover, at a time when many blacks in Northern ghettos were beginning to support the violent attitude of leaders like Malcolm X, the March and the St. Augustine campaign proved that nonviolence was an effective way of attacking racial injustice.
21 Lewis, King: A Biography, pp. 171-209.
22 Colaiaco, Martin Luther King, Jr., p. 70.
23 Blumberg, Civil Rights: The 1960s Freedom Struggle, pp. 108-111.
24 James H. Cone, Martin, Malcolm & America: A Dream or A Nightmare (New York: Orbis
Books, 1991), p. 113.
30
Despite the 24th Amendment, voting rights were still limited since the amendment only dealt with federal elections and did not address voter registration questions. As a response, on July 20, 1963 King and the SCLC went to Mississippi to assist SNCC and CORE in registering black voters. The Freedom Summer Project began with the autumn 1963 Freedom Vote, a mock election organized by SNCC’s Robert Moses. Robert Moses and most SNCC leaders argued that the ballot rather than King style demonstrations would be most effective in gaining civil rights for blacks in the South. The goals of the Freedom Project included registering black voters, establishing Freedom Schools to teach them the essentials of the democratic process, and organizing the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) to challenge the all white Mississippi Democratic delegation at the National Convention in August 1964. Even though the project aimed to show the racial conditions in the deep South and to force the federal government to enforce civil rights laws, it disillusioned its participants since the federal government failed to intervene to protect citizens working for racial justice from white terror. The most important event of the Freedom Project occurred in August at the Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City, New Jersey. Since blacks were illegally excluded from the electoral process in Mississippi, MFDP wanted to be recognized as the state’s legitimate Democratic Party. They expected the support of both the national Democratic Party and President Johnson as evidence of their commitment to protect the voting rights of Mississippi blacks. They were destined to be disappointed.26
The repudiation of the MFDP in Atlantic City contributed to the disillusionment of SNCC, now alienated from the President, the Democratic Party, Northern white liberals and King. The disillusionment of SNCC had serious
26 Stokely Carmichael and Charles V. Hamilton, Black Power: The Politics of Liberation in
31
consequences for the civil rights movement. The anger and frustration that prompted the Black Power movement already existed. Further, as the 1964 Democratic National Convention indicated whites were unwilling to support black equality.27 On the other hand, three years after the Convention, Stokely Carmichael and Charles Hamilton viewed it as the turning point in the black liberation movement: “The major moral of that experience was not merely that the national conscience was generally unreliable but that, very specifically, black people in Mississippi and throughout this country could not rely on their so-called allies.”28
Since King believed that the franchise was essential for blacks to progress in the South, he sought a means to pressure the federal government to enact major legislation to protect the right to vote. He argued that nonviolent direct action could achieve what the Freedom Summer Project failed to achieve. While SNCC continued to focus on black voter registration in rural Mississippi, King and the SCLC sought to dramatize the issue of voting rights in Selma, Alabama, through nonviolent marches. Although the Civil Rights Act of 1964 had ended legal segregation, it did not guarantee the constitutional right to vote. Nonviolent direct action in Selma succeeded in achieving the democratic right to vote by the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Therefore, the Selma campaign marked the culmination of the civil rights movement in the South.29
The major means of winning civil rights in the South had been the legalism advocated by the NAACP, involving legislation and court action. But, if not for mass, nonviolent direct action provoking white racist violence, arousing the conscience of the American public and compelling the federal government to take decisive action, segregation would have not been defeated in the South by 1965.
27 William L. Van Deburg, New Day in Babylon: The Black Power Movement and American
32
In the following years, as the civil rights movement became national, King pursued nonviolent action in the North. But Northern cities presented a more difficult challenge than the South, and the nonviolent method no longer had the same effect. Although the legal barriers to equality had been abolished, the majority of blacks did not have the economic wherewithal to take advantage of the opportunities now available to them. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965 could not entirely change the oppressive living conditions in the ghettos of the North. Therefore deeper economic and social changes were required in order to overcome segregation, unemployment, inadequate housing and schools, family deterioration and police brutality. During the next few years domestic developments such as riots in the Northern ghettos and foreign developments such as the war in Vietnam, which prevented the President’s goal of building the Great Society, worked to divide the movement and replaced civil rights as the nation’s primary concern. Race riots in Watts, Newark, Detroit and
numerous other cities seemed to confirm the view of many civil rights activists that in order to be fully integrated into American society, the freedom movement must
enter a new phase, concentrating on economic and social reforms to improve the lives of blacks in the ghettos.30
Chicago became the first stop in the campaign to eradicate urban poverty. King called for massive civil disobedience to transform Chicago into a just city. However, the fact that in response Chicago Mayor Richard Daley announced the construction of recreational facilities and the appointment of a committee to improve relations between police and the black community did nothing to eradicate slums and poverty in Chicago. Therefore, King decided to move the
28 Carmichael and Hamilton, Black Power, p. 96.
29 Garrow, Bearing the Cross, pp. 357-430; Brooks, Civil Rights Litigation, p. 920. 30 Colaiaco, Martin Luther King, Jr., pp. 178-198.
33
demonstrations from the ghettos to the white neighborhoods and suburbs. He believed whites could not ignore protests in their own neighborhoods.31
On August 19, Mayor Daley applied for and received a legal injunction against the marches. King responded by announcing that he would lead a massive march the following Sunday into the all white working-class suburb of Cicero, beyond the jurisdiction of the injunction. A march to Cicero would almost certainly provoke brutal white violence, creating a crisis that neither the Mayor nor the federal government could ignore. On August 26, King and leaders of the Chicago Movement met at the Palmer House with the Mayor and members of the Chicago Real Estate Board, the Chicago Housing Authority and the business community and reached an agreement. The Leadership Council for Metropolitan Open Housing would be established to provide education and direction for the fulfillment of the agreement. Therefore, after demonstrations, and threats of demonstrations, nonviolence appeared to be successful in Chicago.32
Some criticized the agreement, however. SNCC and CORE rightly argued that the housing agreement did not promise real change in the lives of many ghetto residents, who were in need of jobs and quality education, and lacked the economic resources to move to better neighborhoods. Blacks could not be equally integrated into American society if the nation was not willing to redistribute political and economic power. Thus, Chicago in fact exposed the limitations of the nonviolent method in the North. The violence that subsequently emerged in Northern cities contributed to the defeat in 1966 of a national open housing bill, designed to eliminate discrimination in the sale or rental of housing.33
31 Ibid., pp. 149-177; Garrow, Bearing the Cross, pp. 497-500. 32 Garrow, Bearing the Cross, pp. 529-530.
33 On the other hand, the Chicago campaign had forced the nation to face the deeply
rooted problems of the urban slums, preparing the way for the enactment of the Fair Housing Act of 1968, which was stronger than the failed 1966 open housing bill. Colaiaco, Martin Luther King, Jr., pp. 173-177; Brooks, Civil Rights Litigation, pp. 277-280.
34
To end ghetto riots, King had insisted the federal government must institute a massive program, costing billions of dollars, to provide employment, quality education, decent housing and adequate health care for all citizens. Because the federal government failed to respond with such reforms, King decided that the poor of all races must be mobilized for another nonviolent March on Washington. At a meeting of the SCLC on December 4, 1967, King announced plans for a mass, nonviolent Poor People’s Campaign in Washington, D. C., and argued that massive nonviolent direct action provided a constructive alternative to riots. But the initial demonstration was badly organized, and a group of young militants disrupted the demonstration. Therefore, King was tempted to cancel the campaign. However, the campaign laid the foundations for the “Rainbow Coalition” of blacks, Hispanics, Native American Indians and other minority groups that became the basis for the presidential candidacy of Jesse Jackson in 1984. The Poor People’s Campaign, which was ultimately ruined by King’s assassination, became the final, desperate attempt to make human rights a national priority.34
Meanwhile, by the mid-1960s new angry voices of protest were pressing strategies different from the traditional integrationist approach of such organizations as the NAACP and the SCLC. The bloody riot in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles in 1965 revealed that the end of legal segregation and racially discriminatory voting restrictions in the southern states did not address the main problems of the poor. Urban blacks suffered less from a denial of their civil rights than from unemployment, inadequate housing and limited educational opportunities. Although they were enfranchised, they did not bother to vote because none of the parties addressed their problems. Residential segregation was sustained by laws, regulations and institutional practices that were color-blind but had the effect of disadvantaging blacks more than whites.
