FREEATLASTTHE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT

FREE
AT

LAST
THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT“I Have A Dream”: The August, 1963 March on Washington for Jobs
and Freedom was the largest political demonstration the nation had everseen. Crowds gathered before the Lincoln Memorial and around the
Washington Monument reflection pool heard Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
offer perhaps the finest oration ever delivered by an American.

C O N T E N T S—1 —Slavery Spreads to America

3

A Global Phenomenon Transplanted to America
Slavery Takes Hold
Slave Life and Institutions
Family Bonds
Spotlight: The Genius of the Black Church—2 —“Three-Fifths of Other Persons:” A Promise Deferred
A Land of Liberty?
The Pen of Frederick Douglass
The Underground Railroad
By the Sword
The Rebellious John Brown
The American Civil War
Spotlight: Black Soldiers in the Civil War—3 —“Separate but Equal:” African Americans Respondto the Failure of Reconstruction 18
Congressional Reconstruction
Temporary Gains … and Reverses
The Advent of “Jim Crow”
Booker T. Washington: The Quest for Economic Independence
W.E.B. Du Bois: The Push for Political Agitation
Spotlight: Marcus Garvey: Another Path

—4 —Charles Hamilton Houston and Thurgood Marshall
Launch the Legal Challenge to Segregation 26
Charles Hamilton Houston: The Man Who Killed Jim Crow
Thurgood Marshall: Mr. Civil Rights
The Brown Decision
Spotlight: Ralph Johnson Bunche: Scholar and Statesman
Spotlight: Jackie Robinson: Breaking the Color Barrier

8

—5 —
“We Have a Movement” 35“Tired of Giving In:” The Montgomery Bus Boycott
Sit-Ins
Freedom Rides
The Albany Movement
Arrest in Birmingham
Letter From Birmingham Jail“We Have a Movement”
The March on Washington
SPOTLIGHT: Rosa Parks: Mother of the Civil Rights Movement
Spotlight: Civil Rights Workers: Death in Mississippi
Spotlight: Medgar Evers: Martyr of the Mississippi Movement—6 —“It Cannot Continue:” Establishing Legal Equality

52

Changing Politics
Lyndon Baines Johnson
The Civil Rights Act of 1964
The Act’s Powers
The Voting Rights Act of 1965: The Background
Bloody Sunday in Selma
The Selma-to-Montgomery March
The Voting Rights Act Enacted
What the Act DoesSPOTLIGHT: White Southerners’ Reactions to the Civil Rights Movement

Epilogue

65

The Triumphs of the Civil Rights Movement

—1 —Slavery Spreads to AmericaAmong the antiquities displayed at the United
Nations headquarters in New York is a replicaof the Cyrus Cylinder. Named for Cyrus theGreat, ruler of the Persian Empire and conquerorof Babylonia, the document dates to about 539 B.C. Cyrus
guaranteed to his subjects many of what we today call civilrights, among them freedom of religion and protection of
personal property. Cyrus also abolished slavery, “a tradition,”he asserted, that “should be exterminated the world over.”Throughout history, nations have varied in how broadly
they deﬁne and how vigorously they defend their citizens’
personal protections and privileges. The United States isa nation built on these civil rights, on the soaring ideals
enshrined in its Declaration of Independence and thelegal protections formalized in its Constitution, and mostprominently, in the ﬁrst 10 amendments to that Constitution,
known collectively as the American people’s Bill of Rights.
Yet one group of arrivals did not enjoy those rights
and protections. Even as European immigrants foundunprecedented economic opportunity and greater personal,
political, and religious liberty in the New World, black
Africans were transported there involuntarily, often inchains, to be sold as chattel slaves and compelled to laborfor “masters,” most commonly in the great agricultural
plantations in the South.
This book recounts how those African-American slaves
and their descendants struggled to win — both in law andin practice — the civil rights enjoyed by other Americans. It
is a story of digniﬁed persistence and struggle, a story that
produced great heroes and heroines, and one that ultimately
succeeded by forcing the majority of Americans to confront
squarely the shameful gap between their universal principlesof equality and justice and the inequality, injustice, andoppression faced by millions of their fellow citizens.

slaves and that the Hebrews, upon their exodus from Egypt,used slaves of their own. Early Christianity accepted thepractice, as did Islam. North and East African Arabs enslaved
black Africans, and Egypt and Syria enslaved Mediterranean
Europeans, whom they captured or purchased from slave
traders and typically employed to produce sugar. Many Native
American tribal groups enslaved members of other tribes
captured in war.
A number of factors combined to stimulate the Atlantic
slave trade. The Ottoman conquest of Constantinople (nowIstanbul) in 1453 disturbed trade patterns and deprived
sweet-toothed Europeans of highly prized sugar. Led by thePortuguese, Europeans began to explore the West African
coast and to purchase slaves from African slave traders. After
Christopher Columbus’s 1492 discovery of the New World,
European colonizers imported large numbers of Africanslaves to work the land and, especially in the Caribbean, to

A Global Phenomenon Transplanted to America
Man has enslaved his fellow man since prehistoric times.
While the conditions of servitude varied, slave labor was
employed by the ancient Mesopotamian, Indian, and Chinese
civilizations, in classical Greece and Rome, and in preColombian America by the native Aztec, Inca, and Mayan
empires. The Bible tells us that the Egyptians used Hebrew

Enslaved Africans on the deck of the bark Wildfire, Key West, Florida,
April 1860.

FREE AT LAST: THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT 3

cultivate sugar. Caribbean islands soon supplied some 80 to 90
percent of Western Europe’s sugar demand.
It is difﬁcult in today’s world to understand theprominent role that crops such as sugar, tobacco, cotton, andspices once played in the world economy. In 1789, for example,
the small colony of Saint Domingue (today’s Haiti) accounted
for about 40 percent of the value of all French foreign trade.
The economic forces driving the Atlantic slave trade werepowerful. In all, at least 10 million Africans endured the“middle passage.” (The term refers to the Atlantic Ocean
segment — the second and longest — of the triangular tradethat sent textiles, rum, and manufactured goods to Africa,slaves to the Americas, and sugar, tobacco and cotton toEurope.) Most arrived in Portuguese Brazil, Spanish Latin
America, and the various British and French Caribbean“sugar islands.” Only about 6 percent of the enslaved Africans
were brought to British North America. Even so, the AfricanAmerican experience differed profoundly from those of
the other immigrants who would found and expand theUnited States.

Slavery Takes HoldThe very ﬁrst slaves in British North America arrived by
accident. Twelve years after the 1607 founding of the firstpermanent British settlement, at Jamestown, Virginia, aprivateer docked there with some “20 and odd Negros” it had
4 FREE AT LAST: THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT

An 1823 drawing depicts slaves cutting sugar cane on the Caribbean
island of Antigua.

captured from a Spanish ship in the Caribbean. The settlers
purchased this “cargo,” the original slaves in the future
United States.
For the next 50 years, slaves were not a prominent sourceof labor in the ﬂedgling Virginia colony. The landowning
elites preferred to rely on “indentured” white labor. Under
this arrangement, potential European immigrants signed anindenture, or contract, under which they borrowed from an
employer the price of transportation to America. In return,they agreed to work several years to pay off that debt. During
this period, the sociologist Orlando Patterson writes, relations
between the races were relatively intimate. A small number ofparticularly resourceful blacks even obtained their freedom
and prospered in their own right.
Beginning in the second half of the 17th century, however,both the price of slaves and the supply of immigrants willingto indenture themselves decreased. As slave labor became
cheaper than indentured labor, slavery grew and spread. By
1770, African Americans comprised about 40 percent of the
population in the southern colonies and a majority in South
Carolina. (Slaves were also found in the northern colonies, but
the slave population there never exceeded about 5 percent.)
Faced with such a large, oppressed, and potentially rebellious

minority, southern elites encouraged a hardening of social
attitudes toward African Americans. The children of slave
women were declared to be slaves. Masters were permitted
to kill slaves in the course of punishing them. Perhaps mostimportantly, white Virginia elites began to promote anti-black
racism as a means of dividing blacks from less wealthy
white workers.
Most African-American slaves labored on farms that
produced staple crops: tobacco in Maryland, Virginia,
and North Carolina; rice in the Deep South. In 1793, theAmerican inventor Eli Whitney produced the ﬁrst cotton
gin, a mechanical device that removed cotton seeds from thesurrounding cotton ﬁber. This spurred a dramatic expansion
in cotton cultivation throughout the Lower South, onethat expanded westward through Alabama, Mississippi,
and Louisiana and into Texas. About one million AfricanAmerican slaves moved westward during the period 17901860, nearly twice the number carried to the United Statesfrom Africa.

Slave Life and Institutions
African-American slaves were compelled to work hard, and insome cases brutally hard. In some states, laws known as slave
codes authorized terrible punishments for offending slaves.
According to Virginia’s 1705 slave code:
All Negro, mulatto, and Indian slaves within thisdominion … shall be held to be real estate. If any slave resist
his master … correcting such slave, and shall happen to be
killed in such correction … the master shall be free of allpunishment … as if such accident never happened.
This code also required that slaves obtain written
permission before leaving their plantation. It authorizedwhipping, branding, and maiming as punishment for evenminor offenses. Some codes forbade teaching slaves how toread and write. In Georgia, the punishment for this offense
was a ﬁne and/or whipping if the guilty party were a “slave,
Negro, or free person of color.”
Although the lot of American slaves was harsh, theylabored under material conditions by some measurescomparable to those endured by many European workers
and peasants of that era. But there was a difference. The slaves
lacked their freedom.
Denial of fundamental human rights handicapped
African-American political and economic progress, butslaves responded by creating institutions of their own,
vibrant institutions on which the civil rights movement of
the mid-20th century would later draw for sustenance andsocial capital. Earlier accounts often portrayed the slaves as
infantilized objects “acted upon” by their white masters, but
we now understand that many slave communities managed

to carve out a measure of personal, cultural, and religious
autonomy. “It was not that the slaves did not act like men,”historian Eugene Genovese writes. “Rather, it was that they
could not grasp their collective strength as a people and act
like political men.” Nevertheless, Genovese concludes thatmost slaves “found ways to develop and assert their manhood
and womanhood despite the dangerous compromises forced
upon them.”
One way was the “black church.” Over time, increasing
numbers of African-American slaves embraced Christianity,
typically denominations like Baptist and Methodist thatprevailed among white southerners. Some masters fearedthat Christian tenets would undermine their justifications forslavery, but others encouraged their slaves to attend church,although in a separate, “blacks-only” section.
After exposure to Christianity, many slaves thenestablished their own parallel, or underground, churches.
These churches often blended Christianity with aspectsof the slaves’ former African religious cultures and beliefs.
Religious services commonly incorporated shouting, dance,
and the call-and-response interactions that would later featureprominently in the great sermons of Dr. Martin Luther King
Jr. and other leading black preachers. The black church oftenemphasized different aspects of the Christian tradition than
did southern white churches. Where the latter might interpretthe biblical Curse of Ham (“a servant of servants shall he beunto his brethren”) as justifying slavery, African-American
services might instead emphasize the story of how Moses led
the Israelites from bondage.
For African-American slaves, religion offered a measureof solace and hope. After the American Civil War brought
an end to slavery, black churches and denominationalorganizations grew in membership, influence, andorganizational strength, factors that would prove vital to thesuccess of the civil rights movement.

Family Bonds
The slaves’ tight family bonds would prove a similar sourceof strength. Slave masters could, and often did, split up
families — literally selling members to other slave owners,
splitting husband from wife, parents from children. But
many slave families remained intact, and many scholars
have noted the “remarkable stability, strength, anddurability of the nuclear family under slavery.” Slaves weretypically housed as extended family units. Slave children,
historian C. Vann Woodward writes, at least “were assureda childhood, one exempt from labor and degradation past
the age when working-class children of England and France
were condemned to mine and factory.”

FREE AT LAST: THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT 5

A drawing, circa 1860,
depicts a black preacher
addressing his mixed-race
congregation on a South
Carolina plantation.

The African-American family structure adapted to meetthe challenges posed by slavery, and later by discriminationand economic inequality. Many black family units resembled
extended clans rather than smaller, immediate families. Somewere organized with strong females as central authority
ﬁgures. Slaveholders sometimes encouraged these family
ties, reasoning that the threat of breaking up a family helped
undermine the threats of disobedience and rebellion.
Regardless, strong immediate and extended families
helped ensure African-American survival. In the Caribbeancolonies and in Brazil, slave mortality rates exceeded birthrates, but blacks in the United States reproduced at the samerate as the white population. By the 1770s, only one in ﬁve
slaves in British North America had been born in Africa. Even
after 1808, when the United States banned the importation ofslaves, their numbers increased from 1.2 million to nearly
4 million on the eve of the Civil War in 1861.

6 FREE AT LAST: THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT

Slavery brought Africans to America and deprived themof the freedoms enjoyed by Americans of European origin. But
even in bondage, many African Americans developed strong
family ties and faith-based institutions and laid a foundation
upon which future generations could build a triumphantcivil rights movement. The struggle for freedom and equality
began long before Rosa Parks claimed a seat on the front of
the bus, more than a century before Martin Luther King Jr.
inspired Americans with his famous dream.

The Genius of the Black ChurchAfrican-American
religious communities have contributed
immensely to American
society, not least by supplying
much of the moral, political,
and organizational foundation of the 20th-century
civil rights movement andby shaping the thought of its
leaders, Rosa Parks and theReverend Martin Luther King
Jr. among them.
Enslaved and free AfricanAmericans formed theirown congregations as earlyas the mid- to late 18th
century. After emancipation,
fully fledged denominations
emerged. What we today
call the “black church”
encompasses seven major
historic black denominations:
African Methodist Episcopal(AME); African Methodist
Episcopal Zion (AMEZ);
Christian Methodist
Episcopal (CME); theNational Baptist Convention,
USA, Incorporated; theNational Baptist Conventionof America, Unincorporated;
the Progressive National
Baptist Convention; and the
Church of God in Christ.
These denominations
emerged after the
emancipation of the AfricanAmerican slaves. They drew
mainly on Methodist, Baptist,
and Pentecostal traditions,but often featured ties to
American Catholicism,

Anglicanism, the United
Methodist Church, and ahost of other traditions.
The great gift, indeed
genius, of African-American
religious sensibility is its
drive to forge a common
identity. Black slaves fromdifferent parts of Africa weretransported to America
by means of the “middle
passage” across the Atlantic.
As slaves, they endured
massive oppression. Against
this background of diversity
and social deprivation,
African-American religious
belief and practice afforded
solace and the intellectual
foundation for a successfulmeans of solving deep-seatedconflict: the techniquesof civil disobedience andnonviolence. The black
church also supplied black
political activists with apowerful philosophy: to focus
upon an ultimate solution for
all rather than palliatives fora select few. The civil rights
movement would adopt
this policy — never to allow
systemic oppression of any
human identity. Its genius,then, was a natural overflow
from African-American
religious communities thatsought to make sense ofa tragic history and movetoward a future, not just forthemselves, but also for theirnation and the world.
In short, while some formof resistance to slavery andthen Jim Crow segregation
probably was inevitable, thecommunal spirituality ofthe black church in the faceof repression helped spawn
a civil rights movementthat sought its objectives bypeaceful means.
Many of the powerful
voices of the civil rights
movement — King, of course,
but also such powerful andsignificant figures as U.S.
Representatives Barbara
Jordan and John Lewis, thepolitical activist and Baptist
minister Jesse Jackson, andthe gospel legend Mahalia
Jackson — all were formed
from their worship life in
the black church. Indeed,King’s role as chief articulatorof civil rights reflects the
direct relationship between
African-American religious
communities and the struggle
for racial and social justicein the United States. The
spiritual influence of AfricanAmerican religious practicespread beyond this nation’sshores, as global leaders
such as Nelson Mandela andArchbishop Desmond Tutu
learned from King how toembody a loving, inclusive
African and Christianidentity.
Today’s African-American
communal spirituality is asstrong and engaged as ever.
Black churches work to craft
responses to contemporary
challenges such as the spreadof HIV/AIDS, the need toameliorate poverty, and thedisproportionate recidivism

of imprisoned African
Americans. The search
toward common identity
remains the foundation ofsuch a spirituality, however.
Through the election of
the first African-Americanpresident and the increaseof minorities in higher
education, the journey toward
common identity remains
on course.
In sum, the black church
helped African Americans
survive the harshest formsof oppression and developed
a revolutionary appeal
for universal communal
spirituality. The black church
didn’t just theorize about
democracy, it practiced
democracy. From its roots
there flowered the civilrights movement — creative,
inclusive, and nonviolent.

By Michael Battle
Ordained a priest byArchbishop DesmondTutu, the Very Rev. Michael
Battle is Provost and Canon
Theologian of the Cathedral
Center of St. Paul in the
Episcopal Diocese of Los
Angeles. His books include
The Black Church in America:
African American Spirituality.

FREE AT LAST: THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT 7—2 —“Three-Fifths of Other Persons”
A Promise DeferredDuring the 19th and early 20th centuries,
African Americans and their whiteallies employed many strategies as
they fought to end slavery and thento secure legal equality for the “freedmen.” Progress
toward racial equality was destined to be slow, not least
because slavery and oppression of blacks were among
the sectional political compromises that undergirded
national unity. The Civil War of 1861-1865 would end
slavery in the United States, but once the conflict ended,
northern political will to overcome white southern
resistance to racial equality gradually ebbed. The
imposition of the “Jim Crow” system of legal segregation
throughout the South stifled black political progress.
Nevertheless, African-American leaders continued tobuild the intellectual and institutional capital that would
nourish the successful civil rights movements of the midto late 20th century.

A Land of Liberty?
Slavery divided Americans from their very ﬁrst day of
independence. As the South grew more dependent on a newstaple crop — “King Cotton” — and on the slave-intensive
plantations that cultivated it, the prospect of a clash withincreasingly antislavery northern states grew. The young
nation delayed that conﬂict with a series of moral evasions andpolitical compromises.
The United States’ Declaration of Independence (1776)
includes stirring language on universal brotherhood: “Wehold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are createdequal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain
unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and
the Pursuit of Happiness.” And yet its principal draftsman,Thomas Jefferson, was himself a slaveholding Virginian.
Jefferson understood the contradiction, and his draft sharply
condemned the slave trade — although not slavery itself— calling it “a cruel war against human nature.” But theContinental Congress, America’s de facto government at thetime, deleted the slave trade reference from the Declaration
to avoid any controversy that might fracture its proindependence consensus. It would not be the last time thatpolitical expediency would trump moral imperatives.

8 FREE AT LAST: THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT

Depiction of George Washington with his black field workers on his Mount
Vernon, Virginia, estate, 1757.

By 1787, many Americans had determined to replace
the existing loose, decentralized alliance of 13 states with astronger federal government. The Constitutional Convention,
held in Philadelphia from May to September of that year,
produced a blueprint for such a government. “There were
big ﬁghts over slavery at the convention,” according to David
Stewart, author of The Summer of 1787: The Men Who
Invented the Constitution. While “many of the delegates wereactually abolitionist in their views … there was not a feel for
abolition in the country at the time.”
Because any proposed constitution would not take effectuntil ratified by 9 of the 13 states, it became necessary to reacha compromise on the status of the African-American slaves.
Northern delegates to the convention, led by James Wilsonof Pennsylvania, reached an agreement with three large
slaveholding states. Both sides agreed that every ﬁve “unfree
persons” — slaves — would count as three people whencalculating the size of a state’s congressional delegation. They
also agreed to bar the U.S. Congress for 20 years from passing
any law prohibiting the importation of slaves. (Congress later
would abolish the slave trade, effective 1808. By then, this was
not a controversial measure owing to the natural increase of
the slave population.)

This “three-ﬁfths compromise” has been described as
America’s Faustian bargain, or original sin. As David Walker,
a free northern black, argued in an 1829 pamphlet: “Has Mr.
Jefferson declared to the world that we are inferior to thewhites, both in the endowments of our bodies and of minds?”
The compromise allowed the states to form a stronger union,
but it also ensured that slavery would continue in the South,
where the 1793 invention of the cotton gin had sparked
the growth of a slave-intensive plantation system of cotton
cultivation. It also bore profound political consequences forthe young nation. In the hotly contested presidential electionof 1800, the additional electoral votes awarded southern statesby virtue of their slave populations supplied Thomas Jeffersonwith his margin of victory over the incumbent president, John
Adams of Massachusetts.
Of even greater importance was how slavery affected
the nation’s expansion. The question of whether new states
would permit slavery assumed decisive importance upon
the congressional balance-of-power between the “slave”
and “free” states. During the ﬁrst half of the 19th century,

This map of the United States in 1857 depicts the “free” states in darkgreen, slave states in red and light red, and the territories (American lands
not yet admitted to statehood) in light green.

Congress hammered out a number of compromises thatgenerally ensured that states allowing slavery would enterthe Union paired with new states that prohibited it. The
Missouri Compromise, the Compromise of 1850, and theKansas-Nebraska Act all maintained this political balance. In
1857, however, the Supreme Court ruled in the Dred Scott v.
Sanford case that Congress could not bar slavery in western
territories not yet admitted as states. The decision intensified
the sectional conflict over slavery and hastened the ultimate
confrontation to come.
Even as the young nation’s political system failed tosecure for African Americans the civil rights enjoyed by their
white countrymen, brave men and women were launchingefforts to abolish slavery and to ensure that the United States
would live up to its own best ideals.

FREE AT LAST: THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT 9The Pen of Frederick Douglass
Although the U.S. political system
proved unable to dislodge slavery fromthe American South, the “peculiar
institution,” as southerners often
called it, did not go unchallenged.
Determined women and men —blacks and whites — devoted theirlives to the cause of abolition, thelegal prohibition of slavery. They
employed an array of tactics, bothviolent and nonviolent. And justas in Martin Luther King’s day, thepen and the appeal to consciencewould prove a powerful weapon.
While the American Civil War was
not solely a battle to free the slaves,the abolitionists persuaded many
northerners to concur with thesentiment expressed in 1858 by asenatorial candidate named Abraham
Lincoln: “A house divided against
itself cannot stand. I believe this government cannot endure,
permanently half slave and half free.”
The stirring words of African-American and white
thinkers forced increasing numbers of their countrymen
to confront the contradiction between their noble ideals
and the lives of bondage imposed on black Americans in
the South. Perhaps the most powerful pen belonged toFrederick Douglass, an escaped slave, journalist, publisher,and champion of liberty. Douglass was born into slavery ineither 1817 or 1818. His mistress defied Maryland state law
by teaching the boy to read. At age 13 he purchased his firstbook, a collection of essays, poems, and dialogues extolling
liberty that was widely used in early 19th-century American
schoolrooms. From these youthful studies, Douglass began
to hone the skills that would make him one of the century’s
most powerful and effective orators. In 1838, Douglass
escaped from the plantation where he worked as a field handand arrived in New Bedford, Massachusetts, where he would
launch a remarkable career.
In 1841, the leading white abolitionist, William Lloyd
Garrison, sponsored an anti-slavery convention held in
Nantucket, Massachusetts. One attendee familiar with
Douglass’s talks at local black churches invited him to address
the gathering. “It was with the utmost difficulty that I could
stand erect,” Douglass later wrote, “or that I could command
and articulate two words without hesitation and stammering.”
But his words moved the crowd: “The audience sympathizedwith me at once, and from having been remarkably quiet,
became much excited.” The convention organizers agreed.
10 FREE AT LAST: THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT

An anti-slavery meeting in Boston, 1835, attracts both whites and free blacks.

Their Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society immediately hired
Douglass as an agent.
In his new career, Douglass spoke at public meetings
throughout the North. He condemned slavery and argued that
African Americans were entitled by right to the civil rightsthat the U.S. Constitution afforded other Americans. On anumber of occasions, racist mobs attacked these abolitionist
gatherings, but other whites befriended Douglass andchampioned his cause. After one mob knocked out the teethof a white colleague who saved Douglass from violent attack,Douglass wrote his friend: “I shall never forget how like twovery brothers we were ready to dare, do, and even die for eachother.” Douglass praised his colleague’s willingness to leavea “life of ease and even luxury … against the wishes of yourfather and many of your friends,” instead to do “something
toward breaking the fetters of the slave and elevating thedispised [sic] black man.”
In 1845, Douglass published the ﬁrst of several acclaimed
autobiographies. His writings educated white Americans
about plantation life, disabused them of the notion that slavery
was somehow “good” for blacks, and convinced many that nojust society could tolerate the practice. But with Douglass’s
sudden fame came a real danger: that his master might ﬁnd
and recapture him. Douglass prudently left the country fora two-year speaking tour of England, Scotland, and Ireland.
While Douglass was overseas, his friends purchased his
freedom — the price for one of the nation’s greatest men wasjust over $700.

In Great Britain, Douglass was exposed to a morepolitically aggressive brand of abolitionism. When hereturned to the United States in 1847, Douglass broke with
William Lloyd Garrison. Garrison favored purely moral andnonviolent action against slavery, and he was willing to see
the North secede from the Union to avoid slavery’s “moral
stain.” Douglass pointed out that such a course would do little
for black slaves in the South, and he offered his support for arange of more aggressive activities. He backed mainstream
political parties promising to prevent the extension of slavery
into the western territories and other parties demanding
complete nationwide abolition. He offered his house as astation on the Underground Railroad (the name given to a
network of people who helped fugitive slaves escape to theNorth) and befriended the militant abolitionist John Brown,
who aimed to spark a violent slave uprising.
In 1847, Douglass launched The North Star, the first of
several newspapers he would publish to promote the causesof equal rights for blacks and for women. Its motto was “Rightis of no Sex — Truth is of no Color — God is the Father of us
all, and we are all brethren.” Douglass was an early and fervent
champion of gender equality. In 1872, he would run for vicepresident on an Equal Rights Party ticket headed by Victoria
Claflin Woodhull, the United States’ first woman presidential
candidate.
Douglass campaigned for Abraham Lincoln in the1860 presidential election. When the American Civil War —pitting the northern Union against the rebellious southern
Confederacy — broke out shortly after Lincoln’s inauguration,
Douglass argued that the Union should employ black troops:“Once let the black man get upon his person the brass letters,
U.S.; let him get an eagle on his button, and a musket on hisshoulder, and bullets in his pocket, and there is no poweron earth which can deny that he has earned the right tocitizenship.” Too old himself to ﬁght, Douglass recruited blacksoldiers for the 54th and 55th Massachusetts Regiments, two
black-manned units that fought with great valor.
During the great conflict, Douglass’s relations with
Lincoln initially were choppy, as the president worked first toconciliate the slaveholding border states crucial to the Union
war effort. On September 22, 1862, however, Lincoln issued
the Emancipation Proclamation, declaring the freedom — on
January 1, 1863 — of all slaves held in the areas still in rebellion.
In March 1863, Lincoln endorsed the recruitment of blacksoldiers, and the following year he flatly rejected suggestions toenter into peace negotiations before the South agreed to abolishslavery. The president twice invited Douglass to meet with him
at the White House. Douglass later wrote of Lincoln that “inhis company I was never in any way reminded of my humble
origin, or of my unpopular color,” and the president received
him “just as you have seen one gentleman receive another.”

Douglass’s remarkable career continued after the war’s
end. He worked for passage of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth,and Fifteenth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution — thepostwar amendments that spelled out rights that applied
to all men, not just to whites, and prohibited the individualstates from denying those rights. While it would take a later
generation of brave civil rights champions to ensure thatthese amendments would be honored, they would build on
the constitutional foundation laid by Douglass and others.
Douglass went on to hold a number of local ofﬁces in thecapital city of Washington, D.C., and to continue his work for
women’s suffrage and equality. He died in 1895, by any fair
reckoning the leading African-American ﬁgure of the
19th century.

The Underground Railroad
Frederick Douglass was a man of singular abilities. Hiscontemporaries, both white and African American pursued avariety of tactics to combat slavery and win blacks their civilrights. In a nation that was half slave and half free, one obvious
tactic was to spirit slaves northward to freedom. Membersof several religious denominations took the lead. Beginningaround 1800, a number of Quakers (a religious denomination
founded in England and inﬂuential in Pennsylvania) began
to offer runaway slaves refuge and assistance either to start
new lives in the North or to reach Canada. “Fugitive Slave”
laws enacted in 1793 and 1850 provided for the seizure andreturn of runaway slaves, but the Quakers were willing
nonviolently to disobey what they considered unjust laws.

Harriet Tubman leading escaped slaves to freedom in Canada.

FREE AT LAST: THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT 11

Evangelical Methodists, Presbyterians, and Congregationalists
subsequently joined the effort, which expanded to help greaternumbers of escaped slaves ﬁnd their way out of the South.
Free blacks came to assume increasingly prominent rolesin the movement, which became known as the Underground
Railroad, not because it employed tunnels or trains — it
used neither — but for the railroad language it employed. A“conductor” familiar with the local area would spirit one ormore slaves to a “station,” typically the home of a sympathizing“stationmaster,” then to another station, and so on, until theslaves reached free territory. The slaves would normally travel
under cover of darkness, usually about 16 to 32 kilometers
per night. This was extremely dangerous work. Conductors
and slaves alike faced harsh punishment or death if they were
captured.
The most famous conductor was a woman, an escaped
African-American slave named Harriet Tubman. Afterreaching freedom in 1849, Tubman returned to the Southon some 20 Underground Railroad missions that rescued
about 300 slaves, including Tubman’s own sister, brother,and parents. She was a master of disguise, posing at times asa harmless old woman or a deranged old man. No slave in
Tubman’s care was ever captured. African Americans looking
northward called her “Moses,” and the Ohio River that divided
slave states from free states in parts of the nation the “River
Jordan,” biblical references to reaching the Promised Land.
Slaveholders offered a $40,000 reward for her capture, andJohn Brown called her “General Tubman.”
In 1850, a sectional political compromise resulted in thepassage of a new and stronger Fugitive Slave Law. While many
northern states had quietly declined to enforce the previous
statute, this new law established special commissioners
authorized to enforce in federal court slave-masters’ claims toescaped slaves. It imposed heavy penalties on federal marshals
who failed to enforce its terms, and on anyone who gaveassistance to an escaped slave. The Underground Railroad
now was forced to adopt more aggressive tactics, including
daring rescues of blacks from courtrooms and even fromthe custody of federal marshals.
While the numbers of agents, stationmasters, andconductors was relatively small, their efforts freed tens of
thousands of slaves. Their selfless bravery helped spark an
increase in northern antislavery sentiment. That response,and northern resistance to the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850,
convinced many white southerners that the North would
not permanently accept a half-slave nation.

slave masters. They could look for inspiration to Haiti, where
native resistance expelled the French colonizers, ended theirslave-plantation labor system, and established an independent
republic. In Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, a successful black
entrepreneur named James Forten concluded that African
Americans similarly “could not always be detained in theirpresent bondage.” In the American South, white plantation
owners feared he might be right, and they reacted brutally toeven the slightest tremor of possible rebellion.
Even so, some brave African Americans were determined
to take up arms against impossible odds. Perhaps the bestknown struggle occurred in Virginia in 1831. Nat Turner(1800-1831) was a slave in Southampton County, Virginia. His
first master allowed Turner to be schooled in reading, writing,and religion. Turner began to preach, attracted followers, and,by some accounts, came to believe himself divinely appointed
to lead his people to freedom. On August 22, 1831, Turner anda group of between 50 and 75 slaves armed themselves withknives, hatchets, and axes. Over two days, they moved fromhouse to house, freeing the slaves they met and killing morethan 50 white Virginians, many of them women and children.
The response was as swift as it was crushing. Local militia
hunted down the rebels, 48 of whom would be tried and 18
of whom were hanged. Turner escaped, but on October 30
he was cornered in a cave. After trial and conviction, Turner
was hanged and his body flayed, beheaded, and quartered.
Meanwhile, mobs of vengeful whites attacked any blacks
they could find, regardless of their involvement in the Turner
revolt. About 200 blacks were beaten, lynched, or murdered.
The political consequences of the Nat Turner rebellion
extended far beyond Southampton County. The antislavery
movement was suppressed throughout the South, with harsh
new laws curtailing black liberties more tightly than everbefore. Meanwhile in Boston, William Lloyd Garrison tarredas hypocrites those who blamed the antislavery movement for
Turner’s revolt. The slaves, Garrison argued, had fought for the

By the Sword
As early as 1663, when several Gloucester County, Virginia,
blacks were beheaded for plotting rebellion, AfricanAmerican slaves launched a number of rebellions against their
12 FREE AT LAST: THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT

A depiction of the 1831 Virginia slave rebellion led by Nat Turner.

very liberties that white Americans proudly celebrated
at every turn:Ye accuse the pacific friends of emancipation of instigating
the slaves to revolt. Take back the charge as a foul slander.
The slaves need no incentives at our hands. They will findthem in their stripes — in their emaciated bodies — in theirceaseless toil — in their ignorant minds — in every field, inevery valley, on every hill-top and mountain, wherever you
and your fathers have fought for liberty — in your speeches,
your conversations, your celebrations, your pamphlets,
your newspapers — voices in the air, sounds from acrossthe ocean, invitations to resistance above, below, aroundthem! What more do they need? Surrounded by suchinfluences, and smarting under their newly made wounds,
is it wonderful [surprising] that they should rise to contend— as other “ heroes” have contended — for their lost rights?
It is not wonderful.

The Rebellious John Brown

John Brown, pictured herecirca 1859, led an ill-fatedraid on Harpers Ferry, West
Virginia (then Virginia), in
hopes of sparking a wider
slave rebellion.

Another famous effort to free theAfrican-American slaves by thesword was led by a white American.
John Brown, a native New
Englander, had long mulled the ideaof achieving abolition by force andhad, in 1847, conﬁded to Frederick
Douglass his intent to do precisely
that. In 1855, Brown arrived in
the Kansas Territory, scene ofviolent clashes between pro- andantislavery factions. At issue waswhether Kansas would be admitted
to the Union as a “free-soil” or slavestate. Each faction built its own
settlements.

After slavery advocates conducted a raid on “free”
Lawrence, Kansas, Brown and four of his sons, on May 24,
1856, carried out the Pottawatomie Massacre, descendingon the slaveholding village of Pottawatomie and killing ﬁvemen. Brown then launched a series of guerrilla actions against
armed pro-slavery bands. He returned to New England,
hoping — unsuccessfully — to raise an African-American
ﬁghting force and — more successfully — to raise funds fromleading abolitionists.
After a convention of Brown supporters meeting in
Canada declared him commander-in-chief of a provisional
government to depose southern slaveholders, Brown
established a secret base in Maryland, near Harpers Ferry,
Virginia (now West Virginia). He waited there for supporters,
most of whom failed to arrive. On October 16, 1859, Brown
led a biracial force of about 20 that captured the federal
arsenal at Harpers Ferry and held about 60 local notables
hostage. The plan was to arm groups of escaped slaves andhead south, liberating additional slaves as they marched.
But Brown delayed too long and soon was surrounded by acompany of U.S. Marines led by Lieutenant Colonel Robert
E. Lee (future commander of the southern forces during
the Civil War). Brown refused to surrender. Wounded andcaptured in the ensuing battle, Brown was tried in Virginia
and convicted of treason, conspiracy, and murder.
Addressing the jury after the verdict was announced,
Brown said:
I believe that to have interfered as I have done, as I havealways freely admitted I have done in behalf of His despisedpoor, was not wrong, but right. Now, if it is deemednecessary that I should forfeit my life for the furtherance ofthe ends of justice, and mingle my blood further with theblood of my children and with the blood of millions in thisslave country whose rights are disregarded by wicked, cruel,and unjust enactments, I submit; so let it be done!
Brown was hanged on December 2, 1859, amartyr to the antislavery cause. In the Civil War
that began a year later, Union soldiers marched tovariants of a tune they called “John Brown’s Body”(one version, penned by Julia Ward Howe, would
become “The Battle Hymn of the Republic”). A
typical stanza read:
Old John Brown’s body is a-mouldering in the dust,
Old John Brown’s rifle is red with blood-spots turned
to rust,Old John Brown’s pike has made its last, unflinching
thrust,Harper’s Ferry, Virginia (now West Virginia), site of John Brown’s
infamous raid.

His soul is marching on!

FREE AT LAST: THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT 13

Abraham Lincoln depicted against the
text of his Emancipation Proclamation,
which freed all slaves in the still rebellious
territories, effective January 1, 1863.

14 FREE AT LAST: THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENTThe American Civil War
The issue of slavery and the status of black Americans eroded
relations between North and South from the ﬁrst days ofAmerican independence until the election of Abraham
Lincoln to the presidency in 1860. Lincoln opposed slavery,
calling it a “monstrous injustice,” but his primary concern was
to maintain the Union. He thus was willing to accept slavery
in those states where it already existed while prohibiting
its further extension in the western territories. But whitesoutherners considered Lincoln’s election a threat to theirsocial order. Beginning with South Carolina in December
1860, 11 southern states seceded from the Union, forming theConfederate States of America.
For Lincoln and for millions of northerners, the Union
was, as the historian James M. McPherson has written, “abond among all of the American people, not a voluntary
association of states that could be disbanded by action of any
one or several of them.” As the president explained to his
private secretary: “We must settle this question now, whether
in a free government the minority have the right to breakup the government whenever they choose.” Thus, as Lincoln
made clear early in the war: “My paramount object in thisstruggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or todestroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any
slave I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves
I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving
others alone I would also do that.”
But slavery drove the sectional conflict. As the brutal
war wore on, many northerners grew more unwilling to abide
slavery under any circumstances. Northern troops who cameinto firsthand contact with southern blacks often became
more sympathetic to their plight. Lincoln also saw that freeing
those slaves would strike at the Confederacy’s economic baseand hence its ability to wage war. And once freed, the former
slaves could take up arms for the Union cause, thus “earning”
their freedom. For all these reasons, freeing the black slaves
joined preserving the Union as a northern war aim.
Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, effective
January 1, 1863, declared all slaves in the rebellious states“thenceforward, and forever free.” As he signed the document,
Lincoln remarked that “I never, in my life, felt more certainthat I was doing right, than I do in signing this paper.”The future African-American leader Booker
T. Washington was about seven years old when the
Emancipation Proclamation was read on his plantation. As he
recalled in his 1901 memoir Up From Slavery:
As the great day drew nearer, there was more singing in theslave quarters than usual. It was bolder, had more ring,and lasted later into the night. Most of the verses of theplantation songs had some reference to freedom. ...
Some man who seemed to be a stranger (a U.S. officer, I
presume) made a little speech and then read a rather longpaper — the Emancipation Proclamation, I think. Afterthe reading we were told that we were all free, and could go
when and where we pleased. My mother, who was standingby my side, leaned over and kissed her children, while tearsof joy ran down her cheeks. She explained to us what it all
meant, that this was the day for which she had been so longpraying, but fearing that she would never live to see.
As a condition of regaining their congressional
representation, the seceding states were obliged to ratify theThirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments to the
U.S. Constitution. These “Reconstruction Amendments”
abolished slavery, guaranteed equal protection of the law— including by the states — to all citizens, and barredvoting discrimination on the basis of “race, color, or previous
condition of servitude.” The years following the Civil War thus
established the legal basis for guaranteeing African Americans
the civil rights accorded other Americans. Shamefully, theplain meaning of these laws would be ignored for nearlyanother century, as the politics of sectional compromise again
would trump justice for African Americans.

FREE AT LAST: THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT 15

Black Soldiers in the Civil WarW

hen theAmerican Civil
War beganin 1861, Jacob Dodson, afree black man living inWashington, D.C., wrote
to Secretary of War Simon
Cameron informing himthat he knew of “300 reliable
colored free citizens” whowanted to enlist and defend
the city. Cameron repliedthat “this department has
no intention at present tocall into the service of thegovernment any coloredsoldiers.” It didn’t matter thatblack men, slave and free, hadserved in colonial militias andhad fought on both sides of
the Revolutionary War. Many
black men felt that serving in
the military was a way theymight gain freedom and fullcitizenship.

Why did many militaryand civilian leaders reject
the idea of recruiting blacksoldiers? Some said thatblack troops would prove too
cowardly to fight white men,others said that they would
be inferior fighters, and somethought that white soldiers
would not serve with blacksoldiers. There were a few
military leaders, though, who
had different ideas.
On March 31, 1862, almosta year after the first shots of
the Civil War were fired at
Fort Sumter, South Carolina,
Union (northern) troops
commanded by General
David Hunter took controlof the islands off the coasts
of northern Florida, Georgia,
and South Carolina. Local
whites who owned the richcotton and rice plantations
fled to the Confederate-

controlled (southern)
mainland. Most of their slaves
remained on the islands,
and they soon were joinedby black escapees from themainland who believed theywould be liberated if only they
could reach the Union lines. It
would not be that simple.
Even as Hunter needed
more soldiers to control theregion’s many tidal rivers
and islands against stubborn
Confederate guerrillaresistance, he observed how
escaping mainland slaves
were swelling the islands’
black population. Perhaps,
he reasoned, the African
Americans could solve his
manpower shortage. He
devised a radical plan.
Hunter, a staunch abolitionist, took it upon himself
to free the slaves — not juston the islands but through-out Confederate-controlled
South Carolina, Georgia, andFlorida — and to recruit black
men capable of bearing arms
as Union soldiers. He would
attempt to train and form thefirst all-black regiment of the
Civil War.
News traveled slowly inthose days, and President
Abraham Lincoln did nothear about Hunter’s
regiment until June. While
Lincoln opposed slavery,
he feared moving more
quickly than public opinion
in the embattled North —and particularly in theslaveholding border statesthat had sided with theUnion — would allow. He
also was adamant that “nocommanding general shalldo such a thing, upon myresponsibility, without
consulting me.” In an angryFrederick Douglass: “Once let the black man get upon his person the brass letters U.S.
… a musket on his shoulder, and bullets in his pocket, and there is no power on earth
which can deny that he has earned the right to citizenship.”

16 FREE AT LAST: THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENTWith the Emancipation Proclamation,
the Union (Northern) Army began
actively to recruit African-American
soldiers.

letter, the president informed
the general that neither he
nor any other subordinate
had the right to free anyone,
although he carefully asserted
for himself the right toemancipate slaves at a timeof his choosing. Hunter
was ordered to disband theregiment, but the seed heplanted soon sprouted.
In August 1862, two
weeks after Hunter had
dismantled his regiment, theWar Department allowed
General Rufus Saxton to raise
the Union Army’s first official
black regiment, the First South
Carolina Volunteers. Thisand other black regiments
organized in the coastal
regions successfully defended
and held the coastal islands forthe duration of the war.
The First Kansas
Colored Volunteers was
also organized around thistime, but without official
War Department sanction.
Meanwhile, President
Lincoln had carefully laid thegroundwork for emancipationand the inclusion of menof African descent into themilitary. As white northerners
increasingly understood thatblack slaves were crucial to
the Confederacy’s economy
and to its war effort, Lincoln
could justify freeing the slaves
as matter of military necessity.
When Abraham Lincoln
signed the Emancipation
Proclamation on January 1,
1863, the military’s policy
toward enslaved people
became clearer. Those who
reached the Union lines
would be free. Also, the War
Department began to recruitand enlist black troops for
newly formed regimentsof the Union Army — theUnited States Colored Troops(USCT). All of the officers
in these regiments, however,would be white.
By the fall of 1864, some140 black regiments had beenraised in many northernstates and in southern
territories captured by
the Union. About 180,000
African Americans served
during the Civil War,including more than 75,000
northern black volunteers.
Although the black
regiments were segregatedfrom their whitecounterparts, they fought thesame battles. Black troops
performed bravely andsuccessfully even though
they coped with both theConfederate enemy and thesuspicion of some of theirUnion military colleagues.

Once black men were
accepted into the military,
they were limited inmany cases to garrisonand fatigue duty. The
famed Massachusetts
54th Regiment’s Colonel
Robert Gould Shaw actively
petitioned superiors to givehis men a chance to engage inbattle and prove themselves
as soldiers. Some of the otherofficers who knew what theirmen could do did the same.
Black troops had to fight toget the same pay as whitesoldiers. Some regiments
refused to accept lower pay.
It was not until 1865, the year
the war ended, that Congress
passed a law providing equalpay for black soldiers.
Despite these restrictions,the United States Colored
Troops successfully
participated in 449 military
engagements, 39 of themmajor battles. They foughtin battles in South Carolina,Louisiana, Florida, Virginia,
Tennessee, Alabama, andother states. They bravely
stormed forts and faced
artillery knowing that if
captured by the enemy, theywould not be given the rights
of prisoners of war, but insteadwould be sold into slavery.
The black troops performed
with honor and valor all of
the duties of soldiers.
Despite the Army’s policyof only having white officers,
eventually about 100 blacksoldiers rose from the ranks
and were commissioned as

officers. Eight black surgeonsalso received commissions in
the USCT. More than a dozen
USCT soldiers were given
the Congressional Medal of
Honor for bravery.
In 1948, President Harry
S. Truman ordered thedesegregation of the armed
forces. Today’s military
remains an engine of socialand economic opportunity
for black Americans. But
it was the sacrifices of the
Civil War-era black soldiersthat paved the way for thefull acceptance of African
Americans in the UnitedStates military. Morefundamentally, their efforts
were an important partof the struggle of African
Americans for liberty anddignity.

By Joyce Hansen
A four-time winner of theCoretta Scott King Honor
Book Award, Joyce Hansen
has published shortstories and 15 books ofcontemporary and historicalfiction and non-fiction foryoung readers, including
Between Two Fires: Black
Soldiers in the Civil War.

FREE AT LAST: THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT 17

—3 —“Separate but Equal”

African Americans Respond to the Failureof ReconstructionM

ore than 600,000 Americans perished in
the Civil War. Their sacriﬁce resolved someof the nation’s most intractable conﬂicts.
Slavery at last was prohibited, and theprinciple that no state could secede from the Union wasestablished. But incompatible visions of American society
persisted, and the consequences for African Americans would
prove immense.
One vision, associated during the 19th and early 20th
centuries with the Democratic Party, blended American
individualism and suspicion of big government with apreference for local and state authority over federal power,and, at least in the South, a dogged belief in white superiority.
The Republican Party, founded in the 1850s, was more willingto employ federal power to promote economic development.
Its core belief was often called “free labor.” For millions ofnortherners, free labor meant that a man — the concept then18 FREE AT LAST: THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT

This reconstruction-era wood engraving depicts a Freedman’s Bureau
representative standing between armed white and black Americans. The
failure of Reconstruction would usher in the era of “Jim Crow” segregation in
the American South.

generally applied only to men — could work where and how
he wanted, could accumulate property in his own name, and,most importantly, was free to rise as far as his talents andabilities might take him.
Abraham Lincoln was a model of this self-made man. As
president, he would boast: “I am not ashamed to confess that
25 years ago I was a hired laborer, mauling rails, at work on aflat-boat. … ” Even as many Republicans condemned slavery
as immoral, all viewed the South as lagging in both economic
growth and social mobility. As the historian Antonia Etheart
has written, Republicans saw in the South “an unchangeablehierarchy dominated by the aristocracy of slaveholders.”
After the North’s military victory ended slavery, its freelabor ideology required that the freedmen possess their civilrights. During the years that followed the Civil War, northern
Republicans at ﬁrst were determined to “reconstruct” theSouth along free-labor principles. Although many whitesoutherners resisted, northern military might for a timeensured blacks the right to vote, to receive an education, and,generally, to enjoy the constitutional privileges afforded other
Americans. But northerners’ determination to support blacks’
aspirations gradually ebbed as their desire for reconciliation
with the South deepened. By the end of the 19th century,
southern elites had reversed many black gains and imposed an
oppressive system of legal segregation.

Congressional Reconstruction
The assassination of Abraham Lincoln in April 1865 elevatedVice President Andrew Johnson to the presidency. Johnson, aTennessee Democrat chosen as Lincoln’s 1864 running mateto signal moderation and a desire for postwar reconciliation,
moved swiftly to readmit the former Confederate states tofull membership in the Union. Southern states were obliged
to ratify the Thirteenth Amendment, prohibiting slavery.
But they were not required to protect the equality andcivil rights of their African-American populations. Whitedominated southern state governments organized underJohnson’s guidelines swiftly adopted Black Codes — punitive
statutes that closely regulated the behavior of supposedly“free” African Americans. These laws typically imposed
curfews, banned possession of ﬁrearms, and even imprisoned

The assassination of Abraham Lincoln brought the southerner Andrew
Johnson to the presidency. Here, Johnson pardons white rebels for taking up
arms against the Union.

as vagrants former slaves who left their plantations without
permission. Meanwhile, Johnson ordered the restoration ofabandoned southern plantations to their former slave-masterowners.
Many northerners were outraged. Surely, they argued,
they had not fought and died only to re-empower the racist
southern aristocracy. The 1866 congressional election
returned large numbers of “Radical Republicans” determined
to ensure greater civil rights for blacks, and, more generally,
through government power to reconstruct the South
along northern lines. This 40th Congress refused to seatmembers elected under Johnson-authorized southern state
governments. It then overrode Johnson’s veto to enact several
important civil rights laws.
One such law extended the operations of the Freedman’s
Bureau. Established before Lincoln’s death, this federal agency
helped ease the freed slaves’ transition to freedom. It supplied
medical care, built hundreds of schools to educate blackchildren, and helped freed slaves negotiate labor contracts
with their former owners and other employers.
A second law, the Civil Rights Act of 1866, declaredthat all persons born in the United States were citizens,
without regard to race, color, or previous condition. African
Americans thus were entitled to make and enforce contracts,
sue and be sued, and own property.
Because Johnson opposed and arguably attempted tosubvert the application of these and other measures, theHouse of Representatives in 1868 impeached (indicted)
Johnson, thus initiating the constitutionally proscribedmethod for removing a president from office. The Senate
acquitted Johnson by one vote, but for theremainder of his term, he mostly refrained fromchallenging Congress’s reconstruction program.
Most important of all, Congress madeclear that the formerly rebellious states would
not be permitted to regain their congressional
representation until they ratified the proposed
Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
This amendment would supply the legal bedrockon which the modern civil rights movement
would stake its claim for racial equality. The
first 10 amendments, known collectively as theBill of Rights, had protected Americans against
encroachments by the federal government. Thisafforded African Americans little or no protection
against racist laws enacted by state governments.
The Fourteenth Amendment, ratified in July 1868,
remedied this. “No State,” it reads, shall “deprive
any person of life, liberty, or property, without due
process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction
the equal protection of the laws.” The Fifteenth Amendment,
FREE AT LAST: THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT 19

adopted shortly afterward, declared that the “right of citizensof the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by
the United States or by any state on account of race, color, or
previous condition of servitude.”Temporary Gains … and Reverses
With northern troops enforcing Reconstruction legislation
throughout much of the South, African Americans scoredmajor gains. The apparatus of the slave system — slave
quarters, gang labor, and the like — was dismantled. Blacks
increasingly founded their own churches. Headed by black
ministers, these would provide the organizational sinew onwhich Martin Luther King Jr. and others later would build themodern civil rights movement.
Black voters aligned with a small faction of southernwhites to elect Republican-led governments in several
southern states. Many blacks held important public ofﬁces
at the state and county levels. Two African Americans
were elected to the U.S. Senate, and 14 to the House ofRepresentatives. Typical was Benjamin Sterling Turner,
Alabama’s ﬁrst black congressman. Born into slavery, Turner
was freed by Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation. He swiftly
established himself as an entrepreneur and then was elected
tax collector and city councilman in Selma, the site of a
crucial 20th-century civil rights struggle. Elected to Congressin 1870, Turner secured monthly pensions for black Civil War

U.S. Representative Benjamin Sterling Turner was elected to Congressfrom Reconstruction-era Alabama. With the end of Reconstruction and thewithdrawal of Union troops from the South, black Americans in that region
were systematically deprived of their political rights.

veterans and fought for greater federal expenditures in his
district.
Republican-led state governments in the Reconstructionera South typically raised taxes and expanded social services.
Among their innovations were state-supported educational
systems and measures to subsidize economic growth. African
Americans were major beneﬁciaries of these innovations,and for a time it seemed as if their civil rights might bepermanently secured.
But the majority of southern whites were determined
to resist black equality. Many could not unlearn the harshstereotypes of black inferiority on which they had been raised.
Many southern whites were very poor, and they grounded
their identity in a perceived sense of racial superiority.
Southern elites understood that this racial divide could
block interracial political efforts to advance their common
economic interests. They often employed white racial
resentment as a tool to regain political power.
White southerners, associated in this era with the
Democratic Party, launched a blistering political attack
on white southern Republicans. They called the native
southerners “scalawags,” a term derived from a word meaning“undersized or worthless animal”; the northerners who sought
their fortune in the postwar South were called “carpetbaggers”
because these newcomers allegedly carried their belongings intravel bags made of carpet.
The reaction against newly empowered African
Americans was harsher still. Secret terrorist organizations
such as the Knights of the White Camellia — named for thesnow-white bloom of a southern flowering shrub and intended
to symbolize the purity of the white race — and the Ku Klux
Klan (KKK) launched violent attacks to intimidate black
voters and keep them away from the polls. President Ulysses
S. Grant dispatched three regiments of infantry and a flotillaof gunboats to ensure fair elections in New Orleans in 1874.
Grant used federal troops to smash the Klan, but the violence
continued as militant whites formed informal “social clubs”
described by historian James M. McPherson as “paramilitaryorganizations that functioned as armed auxiliaries of the
Democratic Party in southern states in their drive to ‘redeem’
the South from ‘black and tan Negro-Carpetbag rule.’ ”
Some northern whites feared that Grant had gone
too far, and more simply wearied of the struggle. As
McPherson writes:
Many Northerners adopted a “plague on both your houses”
attitude toward the White Leagues and the “NegroCarpetbag” state governments. Withdraw the federal
troops, they said, and let the southern people work out
their own problems even if that meant a solid South for thewhite-supremacy Democratic Party.
This was essentially what happened. In elections marred

20 FREE AT LAST: THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT

by fraud, intimidation, and violence, Democrats graduallyregained control of state governments throughout the South.
In 1877, a political bargain declared Republican Rutherford B.
Hayes the winner of the closely contested 1876 presidential
election. In exchange, Hayes withdrew the last federal troops
from the South. Black Americans, the overwhelming majorityof whom then lived in the states of the former Confederacy,
were again at the mercy of racist state laws.

The Advent of “Jim Crow”
During the years that followed, and especially after 1890,
state governments in the South adopted segregationist laws
mandating separation of the races in nearly every aspectof everyday life. They required separate public schools,
railroad cars, and public libraries; separate water fountains,restaurants, and hotels. The system became known informallyas “Jim Crow,” from the 1828 minstrel show song “Jump Jim
Crow,” which was typically performed by white performers inblackface as a caricature of the unlettered, inferior black man.
Jim Crow could not have existed had the federal courts
interpreted broadly the relevant constitutional protections.
But the judicial branch instead seized upon technicalities
and loopholes to avoid striking down segregationist laws. In
1875, Congress enacted what would be the last civil rights
law for nearly a century. The Civil Rights Act of 1875 barred“any person” from depriving citizens of any race or color ofequal treatment in public accommodations such as inns,
theaters, and places of public amusement, and in public
transportation. In 1883, the Supreme Court declared the law
unconstitutional, reasoning that the Fourteenth Amendment
prohibited discrimination by states but not by individuals.
Congress accordingly could not prohibit individual acts of
discrimination.
Perhaps the most signiﬁcant judicial decision came in1896. Six years earlier, Louisiana had adopted a law requiring
separate rail cars for whites, blacks, and “coloreds” of mixed
ancestry. An interracial group of citizens who opposed thelaw persuaded Homer Plessy, a public education advocate witha white complexion and a black great-grandmother, to test
the law. Plessy purchased a ticket for a “whites-only” rail car.
After taking his seat, Plessy revealed his ancestry to the train
conductor. He was arrested, and the litigation began.
In 1896, the case reached the U.S. Supreme Court. In
a seven-to-one decision, the court upheld the Louisiana
law. “The enforced separation of the two races,” did not,the majority ruled, “stamp the colored race with a badge ofinferiority.” If black Americans disagreed, that was their own
interpretation and not that of the statute. Thus did the highcourt lend its prestige and its imprimatur to what became
known as “separate but equal” segregation.
One problem with Plessy (formally, Plessy v. Ferguson),as later civil rights advocates tirelessly would document, wasthat separate never really was equal. Public schools and otherfacilities designated colored nearly always were inferior. Often
they were shockingly so. But more fundamentally, the issue
was whether a fair reading of the Constitution might justify
separating Americans on the basis of race. As John Marshall
Harlan, the dissenting justice in the Plessy case, argued inwords that resonate to this day:In view of the Constitution, in the eye of the law, there is in
this country no superior, dominant, ruling class of citizens.
There is no caste here. Our Constitution is color-blind,and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens. In
respect of civil rights, all citizens are equal before the law.
Justice Harlan’s view would at last prevail in 1954, when
the Supreme Court’s unanimous Brown v. Board of Education
decision overruled Plessy. For African Americans, however,
the rise of Jim Crow segregation required new responses, newstrategies for claiming their civil rights.

Booker T. Washington:
The Quest for Economic Independence
The failure of Reconstruction and the rise of legal segregation
forced African Americans to make difﬁcult choices. The
overwhelming majority still lived in the South and faced
ﬁerce, even violent resistance to civil equality. Some concluded
that direct political efforts to assert their civil rights would
be futile. Led by Booker T. Washington (1856-1915), they

Booker T. Washington championed economic empowerment as the means ofachieving future African-American political gains.

FREE AT LAST: THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT 21

argued instead for focusing on black economic development.
Others, including most prominently the leading scholar andintellectual William Edward Burghardt (W.E.B.) Du Bois,
insisted upon an uncompromising effort to achieve the voting
and other civil rights promised by the Constitution and its
postwar amendments.
Born into slavery, Booker T. Washington was about nine
years old at the time of emancipation. He attended Hampton
Normal and Agricultural Institute — today’s Hampton
University — in southeastern Virginia, excelled at his studies,and found work as a schoolteacher. In 1881 he was offered theopportunity to head a new school for African Americans inMacon County, Alabama.
Washington had concluded that practical skills andeconomic independence were the keys to black advancement.
He decided to ground his new school, renamed the Tuskegee
Normal and Industrial Institute (now Tuskegee University)
in industrial education. Male students learned skills suchas carpentry and blacksmithing, females typically studied
nursing or dressmaking. Tuskegee also trained schoolteachers
to staff African-American schools throughout the South. Thisapproach promised to develop economically productive black
citizens without forcing the nation to confront squarely thecivil rights question. A number of leading philanthropists,such as the oil magnate John D. Rockefeller, steel producer
Andrew Carnegie, and Sears, Roebuck head Julius Rosenwald,
all raised funds for Tuskegee. The school grew in size,
reputation, and prestige.
In September 1895, Washington delivered to a
predominantly white audience his famous Atlanta
Compromise speech. He argued that the greatest danger
facing African Americans

But close study of Washington’s speech suggests that
he did not mean to accept permanent inequality. Instead, hecalled for African Americans gradually to amass social capital— jobs “just now” were more valuable than the right to attend
the opera. Or, as he put it more bluntly: “No race that hasanything to contribute to the markets of the world is long inany degree ostracized.”
Washington was the nation’s leading African-American
ﬁgure for many years, although increasing numbers of blacks
gradually turned away from his vision. One problem was thatthe postwar South was itself a poor region, lagging behind
the North in modernization and economic development.
Opportunity for southerners, black or white, simply was
not as great as Booker T. Washington hoped. His gradualist
posture was also unacceptable to blacks unwilling to defer tosome unspeciﬁed future date their claims for full and equal
civil rights.

W.E.B. Du Bois: The Push for Political Agitation
Many blacks turned for leadership to the historian andsocial scientist W.E.B. Du Bois (1868-1963). A graduate of
Fisk University, a historically black institution in Nashville,
Tennessee, Du Bois earned a PhD in history from Harvard
University and took up a professorship at Atlanta University,a school founded with the assistance of the Freedman’s
Bureau and specializing in the training of black teachers,
librarians, and other professionals. Du Bois authored andedited a number of scholarly studies depicting black life in
America. Social science, he believed, would provide the key toimproving race relations.

is that in the great leap from slavery to freedom wemay overlook the fact that the masses of us are to liveby the productions of our hands, and fail to keep inmind that we shall prosper in proportion as we learn
to dignify and glorify common labor, and put brains
and skill into the common occupations of life. … It isat the bottom of life we must begin, and not at the top.
Nor should we permit our grievances to overshadow
our opportunities.
Not surprisingly, many whites found soothing avision in which blacks concentrated on acquiring realestate or industrial skill rather than political office, avision that seemingly accepted the Jim Crow system.
As Washington put it in his Atlanta address: “Theopportunity to earn a dollar in a factory just now is
worth more than the opportunity to spend a dollar inan opera-house.”

22 FREE AT LAST: THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT

W.E.B. Du Bois, one of the United States’ leading 20th century figures,
testifies before Congress in 1945.

But as legal segregation — often enforced by lynchings(extralegal and often mob-instigated seizures and killings of“criminal suspects,” without trial and usually on the flimsiestof evidence) — took hold throughout the South, Du Bois
gradually concluded that only direct political agitation andprotest could advance African-American civil rights. Inevitably
Du Bois came into dispute with Booker T. Washington, whoquietly built political ties to national Republicans to securea measure of political patronage even as his priority for
American blacks remained economic development.
In 1903, Du Bois published The Souls of Black Folk.
Described by the scholar Shelby Steele as an “impassioned
reaction against a black racial ideology of accommodationand humility,” Black Folk declared squarely that “the problemof the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line.”
Addressing Booker T. Washington, Du Bois argued that
his doctrine has tended to make the whites, North andSouth, shift the burden of the Negro problem to the Negro’s
shoulders and stand aside as critical and rather pessimistic
spectators; when in fact the burden belongs to the nation,and the hands of none of us are clean if we bend not ourenergies to righting these great wrongs.
Du Bois also disagreed with Washington’s exclusiveemphasis on artisan skills. “The Negro race, like all races,” heargued in a 1903 article, “is going to be saved by its exceptional
men.” This “talented tenth” of African Americans “must be
made leaders of thought and missionaries of culture among
their people.” For this task, the practical training Booker T.
Washington offered at Tuskegee Institute would not suffice:If we make money the object of man-training, we shalldevelop money-makers but not necessarily men; if we maketechnical skill the object of education, we may possess
artisans but not, in nature, men. Men we shall have only as
we make manhood the object of the work of the schools —
intelligence, broad sympathy, knowledge of the world that
was and is, and of the relation of men to it. … On thisfoundation we may build bread winning, skill of hand, andquickness of brain, with never a fear lest the child and man
mistake the means of living for the object of life.

weakly organized and poorly funded. It disbanded in 1910. A newand stronger organization was ready to take its place by then.
A false charge that a black man had attempted to rape awhite woman led to anti-black rioting in Springﬁeld, Illinois, inAugust 1908. The riots left seven dead and forced thousandsof African Americans to flee the city. The suffragette MaryWhite Ovington led a call for an organizational meeting ofreformers. “The spirit of the abolitionists must be revived,”
she later wrote. Her group soon expanded and linked up withDu Bois and other African-American activists. In 1910, theyfounded the National Association for the Advancement ofColored People (NAACP). The new organization’s leadership
included white Americans, many of them Jewish, and Du
Bois, who assumed the editorship of the NAACP’s inﬂuential
magazine The Crisis.
Beginning in 1913, when President Woodrow Wilson,
a native southerner, permitted the segregation of the federal
civil service, the NAACP turned to the courts, initiating
the decades-long legal effort to overturn Jim Crow. Under
Du Bois’s leadership, The Crisis analyzed current affairs
and featured the works of the great writers of the Harlem
Renaissance of the 1920s and 1930s, among them Langston
Hughes and Countee Cullen. By some estimates, its
circulation exceeded 100,000.
Du Bois continued to write, cementing a reputation as
one of the century’s major American thinkers. He emerged
as a leading anticolonialist and expert on African history.
In 1934, Du Bois broke with the integrationist NAACP over
his advocacy of Pan-African nationalism and the growing
Marxist and socialist aspects of his thought. Du Bois would
live on into his 90s, dying a Ghanaian citizen and committed
Communist.
But the NAACP, the organization he helped to found,would launch the modern civil rights struggle.

Two years later, Du Bois and a number of leading black
intellectuals formed the Niagara Movement, a civil rights
organization squarely opposed to Washington’s policies ofaccommodation and gradualism. “We want full manhood
suffrage and we want it now!” Du Bois declared. (Du Bois also
advocated woman suffrage.) The Niagara group held a notable
1906 conference at Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, site of John
Brown’s rebellion; lobbied against Jim Crow laws; distributed
pamphlets and circulars; and attempted generally to raise theissues of civil rights and racial justice. But the movement was

FREE AT LAST: THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT 23

Marcus Garvey:
Another PathM

arcus Garvey(1887-1940),
a major black
nationalist of the early 20th
century, was born in Jamaica
but spent his most successful
years in the United States.
An enthusiastic capitalist,
he believed that African
Americans and other black

persons around the world
should make a united effort
to form institutions that
could concentrate wealth andpower in their own hands. To
this end he formed, among
other organizations, theUnited Negro Improvement
Association (UNIA).
After reading Booker T.

The black nationalist Marcus Garvey represented one strand of AfricanAmerican thought. Most blacks, however, would choose to fight for equality
and full participation in U.S. political and economic life.

24 FREE AT LAST: THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT

Washington’s Up From
Slavery, Garvey asked himself:“Where is the black man’s
government? Where is hisking and kingdom? Whereis his president, his country,
his ambassadors, his army,
his navy, and his men of big
affairs? I could not find them.
I decided, I will help tomake them.”
Garvey was born in theparish of St. Ann, Jamaica,
where in his early teens
he was apprenticed to his
godfather, a printer named
Alfred Burrowes. Garvey’s
father was a bookish man,as was Burrowes, and theyouthful Marcus received
early exposure to the worldof letters. Migrating to
Kingston, Garvey displayed
highly refined talents as a
typesetter and developed aninterest in journalism.
After being blacklisted
for attempting to organize
workers, he left Jamaica tovisit Latin America, andhe later spent two years in
England. During these years,
he studied informally at the
University of London andworked for the SudaneseEgyptian black nationalist,
Duse Mohammed Ali,
founder of The African Times
and Orient Review.

Garvey was determinedto spread his program ofblack empowerment in the
United States. Arriving
in 1915, Garvey argued
that African Americans
could command respect
by building their economic
power. To that end, he strove
to establish a network of
black-owned businesses:
grocery stores, laundries, andothers capable of thriving
independently of the white
economy. While these andother initial attempts toorganize the masses met
with little success, Garvey’s
perseverance earned him
increasing fame; by the endof the First World War, hisname was widely known
among black Americans.
Garvey was a master atmanipulating the media
and at staging dramatic
public events. He founded
his own newspaper, Negro
World, which was distributed
widely throughout theUnited States and in some
Latin American countries.
He held colorful annual
conventions in New York
City, where men and womenmarched under a bannerof red, black, and green.
This flag, along with othertricolored emblems, remains
popular among African
Americans to the presentday. The striking military
regalia sometimes worn by
Garveyites demonstrated thenationalistic and militaristic

Advertisement for a 1917 Marcus Garvey speech.

image that his black
nationalist movement strove
to convey.
There is a legend thatonce a Congolese leader in aremote African village was
asked if he knew anything
about the United States. His
response was said to be, “Iknow the name of Marcus
Garvey.”Under the name of theBlack Star Line, the UNIA
launched an abortive attempt
to open up the world toblack-owned commerce. The
organization sold impressive
amounts of stock in thisenterprise, mostly in small
amounts to ordinary working

people, and purchased several
steamships, unfortunately in
dilapidated condition.
Garvey believed inseparation of the races andwas willing to cooperatewith leaders of white racist
organizations, notably the
Ku Klux Klan. After meetingwith Klan leadership, he cameunder attack from several
already-hostile black leaders.
A. Philip Randolph, founder
and leader of the Brotherhoodof Sleeping Car Porters,
America’s earliest successful,
predominantly black labor
union, was particularly
hostile.

Randolph accused
Garvey of cooperating withwhite racists in a scheme torepatriate American blacks
back to Africa. Garvey
denied any such ambitions,but he did send emissaries
to the Republic of Liberia toinvestigate the prospects of
new business undertakings,
and he found considerable
sympathy for his ideas among
young African intellectuals.
In 1925, Garvey was
imprisoned on federalcharges of using the mails
to defraud. He denied thecharge, and even some of
his critics found it unfair.
President Calvin Coolidge
pardoned Garvey in 1927, but
as a convicted felon who was
not a U.S. citizen, Garvey was
immediately deported to his
native Jamaica. W.E.B. Du
Bois, one of Garvey’s severest
critics, wished him well,encouraging him to pursue
his efforts in his own country.
Establishing himself in
London, England, Garvey
launched a new magazine,
The Black Man, which
criticized such prominent
black American figures as
the heavyweight boxing
champion Joe Louis, theentertainer and politicalactivist Paul Robeson, andthe controversial spiritual
figure Father Divine for theirfailure to supply effective
race leadership. But Garvey
was unable there either torebuild his organization to

its previous membershiplevels. He retained sufficient
U.S. popularity to draw
an attentive audience to ameeting in Windsor, Ontario,
just across the river from
Detroit, Michigan, a basefor Garvey’s earlier activism.
His final operations wereconducted from London,
England, where he diedin 1940.

By Wilson Jeremiah Moses
Moses is Ferree Professor ofHistory at the Pennsylvania
State University and author of
the scholarly article “Marcus
Garvey: A Reappraisal.” His
books include The Golden
Age of Black Nationalism,
1850-1925.

FREE AT LAST: THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT 25

—4 —Charles Hamilton Houston andThurgood MarshallI

Launch the Legal Challenge to Segregationn November 1956, a black-instigated boycott of thesegregated bus system in Montgomery, Alabama,
had entered its 12th month. A year earlier, a black
woman named Rosa Parks had bravely refused torelinquish her front seat on a municipal bus to a white man,launching a political movement and introducing Americans
to a courageous and dynamic leader — the Reverend Dr.
Martin Luther King Jr. But it was not until the courts forbade
the relegation of African Americans to the back of thebus that the city of Montgomery yielded and the boycott
succeeded. As historian Kevin Mumford has written:“Without constitutional legitimacy and the promise ofprotection from the courts, local black protesters would be
crushed by state and local officials, and white segregationists
could easily prevail.”
Americans often refer to the mid-20th-century social
justice campaigns led by King and others as the civil rights
movement. As we have seen, however, African Americans

and their allies had long struggled to achieve the rights
promised them by the U.S. Constitution and its post-Civil
War amendments. It is important also to understand thatthe modern civil rights movement rested on two pillars.
One was formed by the brave nonviolent protesters who
forced their fellow Americans at last to confront squarely
the scandalous treatment of black Americans. The second
consisted of attorneys such as Charles Hamilton Houston andhis greatest student, Thurgood Marshall, who ensured thatthose protestors would have the United States’ most powerfulforce — the law of the land — on their side.
Marshall, the attorney who argued for Montgomery’s
blacks in 1956, relied on legal precedents he had established inother successful court cases. Brown v. Board of Education was
the most celebrated, but even before Brown, the partnership
between Houston and Marshall had dismantled much of thelegal structure by which the American South had enforced its
Jim Crow system of race segregation.

Charles Hamilton Houston:
The Man Who Killed Jim Crow

The skilled litigator and legal educator Charles Hamilton Houston launched
the legal assault on “Jim Crow” laws.

26 FREE AT LAST: THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENTCharles Hamilton Houston was born in 1895 in Washington,
D.C. A brilliant student, he graduated as a valedictorian fromAmherst College at the age of 19, then served in a segregated
U.S. Army unit during the First World War. After his brushwith racism in the Army, Houston determined to make thefight for civil rights his life’s calling. Returning home, hestudied law at Harvard University, becoming the first AfricanAmerican editor of its prestigious law review. He would go on
to earn a PhD in juridical science at Harvard and a doctor ofcivil law degree at the University of Madrid in Spain.
Houston believed that an attorney’s proper vocation
was to wield the law as an instrument for securing justice.
“A lawyer’s either a social engineer or he’s a parasite onsociety,” he argued. In 1924, Houston began teaching parttime at Howard University Law School, the Washington,
D.C. institution responsible by some accounts for training
fully three-fourths of the African-American attorneys thenpracticing. By 1929, Houston headed the law school.
In just six years, Houston radically improved theeducation of African-American law students, earned fullaccreditation for the school, and produced a group of lawyers
trained in civil rights law. In the book Black Profiles, George R.

Metcalf writes that Houston took the job to turn Howard into“a West Point [a popular name for the United States Military
Academy] of Negro leadership, so that Negroes could gain
equality by fighting segregation in the courts.”
Meanwhile, the National Association for the
Advancement of Colored People was laying the groundwork
for a legal challenge to the separate-but-equal doctrine
approved in the Supreme Court’s 1896 Plessy decision. On
Houston’s recommendation, the organization engaged former
U.S. Attorney Nathan Ross Margold to study the practicalworkings of separate but equal in the South. Margold’s report— 218 legal-sized-pages long — was completed in 1931. It
documented woeful inequality in state expenditures between
white and black segregated schools.
In 1934, Houston accepted the position of NAACP
special counsel. He surrounded himself with a select group ofyoung, mostly Howard-trained lawyers, among them James
Nabrit, Spottswood Robinson III, A. Leon Higginbotham,
Robert Carter, William Hastie, George E.C. Hayes, JackGreenberg, and Oliver Hill. With his young protégé Thurgood
Marshall often in tow, Houston began to tour the South,
armed with a camera and a portable typewriter. Marshall later
recalled that he and Houston traveled in Houston’s car: “There
was no place to eat, no place to sleep. We slept in the car and
we ate fruit.” This could be dangerous work, but the visual
record Houston compiled and the data amassed by Margold
would anchor a new legal strategy: If the facilities allocatedto blacks were not equal to those afforded whites, Houston
reasoned, segregationist states were not meeting even the
Plessy standard. Separate but equal logically required thosestates either to improve drastically the black facilities, a hugely
expensive undertaking, or else integrate.
This equalization strategy bore fruit in 1935, when
Houston and Marshall prevailed in a Maryland case, Murrayv. Pearson. The African-American plaintiff challenged his
rejection by the segregated University of Maryland law school.
The university’s lawyers argued that the school met the
separate but equal requirement by granting qualified black
applicants scholarships to enroll at out-of-state law schools.
The state courts rejected this argument. While they were
not yet prepared to rule against segregated public schools,
they did hold that Maryland’s out-of-state option was notan equal opportunity. Maryland’s law school was ordered toadmit qualified African-American students. The triumph was
especially sweet for Marshall, who numbered himself among
the qualified blacks rejected by the school.
Houston retired from the NAACP in 1940 because ofill health, and he died in 1950. “We owe it all to Charlie,”
Marshall later remarked. While Houston’s prize student
would lead the final legal assault on segregation, it was
Houston, the teacher, who devised the strategy andilluminated the path.

Thurgood Marshall (left) and Charles Hamilton Houston flank Donald Gaines Murray, plaintiff ina case that struck the University of Maryland Law School policy denying admission to qualified
black students.

Thurgood Marshall in 1962, after Senate confirmation of
his appointment to the U.S. Court of Appeals. In 1967,
President Lyndon B. Johnson appointed Marshall the first
African-American Supreme Court justice.

FREE AT LAST: THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT 27

Thurgood Marshall: Mr. Civil Rights“No other American did more to lead our country out of
the wilderness of segregation than Thurgood Marshall,”said his fellow Supreme Court justice, Lewis Powell. Bornin 1908 and educated in a segregated Baltimore, Maryland,secondary school, Marshall attended Lincoln University, “thefirst institution founded anywhere in the world to provide ahigher education in the arts and sciences for youth of African
descent.” Knowing he would be turned away by the whitesonly University of Maryland Law School, Marshall enrolledat Howard Law School, enduring the long commute fromBaltimore to Washington, D.C. His mother pawned her
wedding and engagement rings to pay the tuition. Marshallexcelled at his studies, graduated first in his class of 1933, andearned the respect of Charles Hamilton Houston.
Working closely with Houston, Marshall prevailed
in the Murray v. Pearson case described previously, thenaccepted a staff attorney position with the NAACP. In 1938,
he succeeded Houston as head of the organization’s legal
committee. In 1940, he became the first chief of the NAACP
Legal Defense Fund.
It was a wise choice. Marshall possessed a unique
combination of skills. He was, as United Press International
later concluded,… an outstanding tactician with exceptional attention todetail, a tenacious ability to focus on a goal — and a deep
voice that often was termed the loudest in the room. He
also possessed a charm so extraordinary that even the mostintransigent southern segregationist sheriff could not resist
his stories and jokes.

to vote in the general election, they were just voting for one
segregationist or the other; they didn’t have a choice.”• Morgan v. Virginia (1946), where Marshall obtained a
Supreme Court ruling barring segregation in interstate bus
transportation. In a later case, Boynton v. Virginia (1960),
Marshall persuaded the court to order desegregation of bus
terminals and other facilities made available to interstate
passengers. These cases led to the Freedom Ride movementof the 1960s.
• In Patton v. Mississippi (1947), the Supreme Court
accepted Marshall’s argument that juries from which
African Americans had been systematically excluded could
not convict African-American defendants.
• In Shelley v. Kraemer (1948), Marshall persuaded theSupreme Court that state courts could not constitutionallyprevent the sale of real property to blacks, even if thatproperty was covered by a racially restrictive covenant.
These covenants were a legal tactic commonly used toprevent homeowners from selling their properties to blacks,
Jews, and other minorities.
The NAACP team’s victories had established that the
courts would overturn separate-but-equal arrangements
where facilities were in fact not equal. It was a realachievement, but not the best tool to effect broad change,
especially with regard to education. Poor African Americans
in each of the hundreds of school districts in the South
could hardly be expected to litigate the comparative meritsof segregated black and white schools. Only a direct rulingagainst segregation itself could at one stroke eliminate
disparities like those in Clarendon County, South Carolina,
where per pupil expenditures in 1949-1950 averaged $179

Armed with this potent combination of likeability andskill, Thurgood Marshall in 1946 persuaded an all-whiteSouthern jury to acquit 25 blacks of a rioting charge. On otheroccasions, he escaped only narrowly the beatings — or worse— risked by every assertive African American in the Jim
Crow South.
It was under Marshall that the Houston-devised
gradualist legal strategy at last succeeded. Case by case,Marshall and the NAACP attorneys chipped away at thelegal pillars upholding segregation. In all, Marshall won an
astounding 29 of the 32 cases he argued before the Supreme
Court. His legal victories included the following:•S mith v. Allwright (1944), a Supreme Court decisionbarring the whites-only primary elections in which politicalparties chose their general election candidates. According
to his biographer, Juan Williams, Marshall considered thecase his most important triumph: “The segregationists
would [demand that (the candidates) support segregation tocapture their party’s nomination], and by the time the blacks
and Hispanics and ... even in some cases, the women, got
28 FREE AT LAST: THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT

Federal law often provided African Americans greater protection, but it
typically applied only in an “interstate” context. Years before Rosa Parks, Irene
Morgan refused to give up her seat on a bus whose route crossed state lines.
With Thurgood Marshall as her attorney, Morgan prevailed, and segregation
was legally barred on interstate bus routes.

Clockwise from top: President Dwight D.
Eisenhower would use federal troops to ensure
the enrollment of the first black students in thepreviously segregated Little Rock [Arkansas]
Central High School.
The Revs. Martin Luther King Jr., Fred
Shuttlesworth, and Ralph Abernathy confer.
A sign of progress: removal of a Jim Crow signfrom a Greensboro, North Carolina, bus, 1956.

for white students and only $43 for blacks. Marshall would
succeed in getting this direct ruling with the “case of the
century,” Brown v. Board of Education.

The Brown Decision
The Brown case began to take shape once Marshall found
the right plaintiff in the Reverend Oliver Brown, father of
Topeka, Kansas, grade-schooler Linda Brown. Linda had
been obliged to attend a black school 21 blocks from herhouse, although there was a white school only seven blocks
away. The Kansas state courts had rejected Brown’s claim byfinding that the segregated black and white schools were ofcomparable quality. This gave Marshall the chance to urgethat the Supreme Court at last rule that segregated facilities
were, by definition and as a matter of law, unequal and hence
unconstitutional.
Marshall’s legal strategy relied on social scientificevidence. The NAACP Legal Defense Fund assembled ateam of experts spanning the fields of history, economics,
political science, and psychology. Particularly significant
was a study in which the psychologists Kenneth and Mamie
Clark sought to determine how segregation affected the selfesteem and mental well-being of African Americans. Among
their poignant findings: Black children aged three to seven
preferred white rather than otherwise identical black dolls.

FREE AT LAST: THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT 29

On May 17, 1954, a unanimous Supreme Court vindicatedMarshall’s strategy. Citing the Clark paper and other studies
identified by plaintiffs, the Supreme Court ruled decisively:... in the field of public education the doctrine of “separate
but equal” has no place. Separate educational facilities are
inherently unequal. Therefore, we hold that the plaintiffs
and others similarly situated ... are, by reason of thesegregation complained of, deprived of the equal protectionof the laws guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment.
Education attorney Deryl W. Wynn, a member of the
Oxford University Roundtable on Education Policy, has said of
the significance of Brown:
Here was the highest court in the land essentially sayingthat something was wrong with how black Americans werebeing treated.... I remember my father, who was a teenager
at the time, saying the decision made him feel like he wassomebody.... On a personal level, Brown’s real legacy is thatit serves as a constant reminder that each child, each of us,
is somebody.
The Court did not specify a timeframe for ending school
segregation, but the following year, in a group of cases known
collectively as “Brown II,” Marshall and his colleagues secured
a Supreme Court ruling that desegregation proceed “with alldeliberate speed.”
Even then, resistance continued in parts of the South. In
September 1957, when black students were forcibly turned
away from Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas,
Marshall flew to the city and filed suit in federal court.
His victory in this case set the stage for President Dwight
Eisenhower’s declaration of September 24: “I have today issued
an Executive Order directing the use of troops under federal
authority to aid in the execution of federal law at Little Rock,Arkansas.... Mob rule cannot be allowed to override thedecisions of our courts.”
Brown, Little Rock, and the NAACP team’s other legal
triumphs illustrated both the strengths and the limits of the“legal” civil rights movement. Black Americans, relegatedfor decades to inferior, segregated schools, scarcely might
have imagined the sight of federal authorities escorting black
students into formerly all white classrooms — in Little Rock,at the University of Mississippi in 1962, and at the Universityof Alabama in 1963. But litigation worked slowly, and one caseat a time.

30 FREE AT LAST: THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT

Legal segregation, meanwhile, still prevailed in much of
the South, not just at many schools but at nearly every kind of
public facility, from swimming pools to buses and from movie
theaters to lunch counters. And segregationists succeeded
all too often in depriving African Americans of their mostbasic constitutional right. Through a combination of unfair
technicalities, outright fraud and chicanery, and ultimatelyby threat of violence, the plain language of the Fifteenth
Amendment was subverted, and blacks throughout the South
were unable to vote.
Plainly, new civil rights laws were required. Passing
them would require a political consensus strong enough toovercome the die-hard opposition of southern representatives
in Congress. The legal struggle continued with Thurgood
Marshall leading the way — from 1961 to 1965 as Judge
Marshall of the U.S. Court of Appeals (the nation’s second
highest federal court), and then during the quarter-century
from 1967 to 1991 as the nation’s first African-American
Supreme Court justice.
Meanwhile, a new, political civil rights movement wascoalescing. Brave African Americans, joined by allies of every
race and creed, began firmly but peaceably to insist upon
the full measure of civil rights to which they were entitledas Americans. As they forced their countrymen to confront
squarely the unconscionable realities of segregation andracial oppression, the balance of national sympathies — andof political forces — shifted. It all began on a December
1955 evening in Montgomery, Alabama, when a 42-year-old
seamstress, tired after a long day at work, refused to give up
her seat on a segregated bus.

Ralph Johnson Bunche:
Scholar and StatesmanE

ven as African
Americans fought for
their civil rights, theirindividual accomplishments
demonstrated the justice of
their cause. The achievementsof the Nobel Prize-winningscholar and international
official Ralph Bunche
demonstrated to all fairminded people that black
Americans could contribute
fully to American society.
Ralph Bunche was bornin Detroit, Michigan, on
August 7, 1903. His father
was an itinerant barber, hismother a housewife andamateur pianist. His father
abandoned the family, and his
mother died when Bunche
was 14 years old. From thenon he lived in Los Angeles,
California, with his maternal
grandmother, whose wisdomand strength of character
greatly influenced him. He
graduated with honors fromthe University of California
at Los Angeles and continued
as a graduate student on
scholarship at Harvard
University.
From his earliest years,
Bunche was acutely consciousof racial discrimination andwas determined to work
against it. His studies ofcolonial Africa persuaded
him that colonialism had
much in common with racial
discrimination in the UnitedStates. He was determined tohelp put an end to both.

Bunche set up the Political
Science Department at
Howard University, thehistorically black university
in Washington, D.C. His
many articles on racial
discrimination later became
basic literature for the U.S.
civil rights movement.
Bunche also pioneered
the study of colonialism in
the United States. He wasthe chief associate and cowriter of the Swedish social
economist Gunnar Myrdal,
whose landmark 1944 study

Dr. Ralph J. Bunche, peacemaker, mediator, and U.S. diplomat, receives the1950 Nobel Prize for Peace.

of U.S. race relations, An
American Dilemma, wascited approvingly by the U.S.
Supreme Court in its Brown v.
Board of Education decision.
As the Second WorldWar loomed, Bunche
was recruited by the U.S.
government to advise on
Africa, and then transferredto the State Department towork on the future United
Nations charter. He was
the first black official in theState Department. At the
San Francisco Conferencein 1945, he drafted two
chapters of the charter,
on non-self-governing
territories (colonies) andon the trusteeship system.
These chapters provided
the basis for accelerating
decolonization after
the war. Bunche did asmuch as anyone to makedecolonization a reality.

FREE AT LAST: THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT 31

In the newly established
United Nations, Bunche
set up the trusteeshipsystem. His achievements
as a member of the
U.N. Secretariat wereextraordinary. As
secretary of the 1947 U.N.
Special Commission on
Palestine, Bunche wrote
the commission’s majority
report on partition as wellas the minority report on afederal state. The former was
adopted by the U.N. General
Assembly and remains thebasic goal of peacemakers in
the Middle East.
In May 1948, the British
left Palestine, a Jewish state
was declared in that partof mandatory Palestine so
designated by the General
Assembly, and five Arabstates invaded the newstate of Israel. The U.N.
Security Council appointed
a mediator, Count Folke
Bernadotte, with Bunche
as his chief adviser. They
established a truce inPalestine, and Buncheorganized a group of U.N.
military observers tosupervise it, the beginningof U.N. peacekeeping
operations. Bernadotte
was assassinated by the
Stern Gang (an armed,

underground Zionist faction
condemned by Bunche andby mainstream Zionists)
in Jerusalem in September
1948, and Bunche became
mediator. In January 1949,
he initiated armistice talks,
starting with Egypt and Israel.
Armistice agreements wereconcluded between Israel
and her four Arab neighbors,
providing a formal basis forthe cessation of hostilities.
In 1950, Bunche won theNobel Peace Prize for theseachievements.
Dag Hammarskjold
of Sweden became U.N.
Secretary-General in 1953.
As an undersecretarygeneral, Bunche became
Hammarskjold’s closest
political adviser. In 1956 —after Egyptian nationalizationof the Suez Canal — Britain,
France, and Israel invaded
Egypt in an ill-advisedadventure that shocked theworld. To get the invadersout of Egypt required
something completely new,a U.N. “peace and police
force,” as its sponsor, Lester
Pearson of Canada, called it.
Hammarskjold asked Bunche
to raise and deploy thisforce with minimum delay.
Ominous Soviet threats ofintervention lent additionalurgency. Working around theclock with the enthusiastic
support of the United Statesand many other countries,

32 FREE AT LAST: THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT

Bunche assembled anddeployed the United Nations
Emergency Force in Egypt
only eight days after the
General Assembly had called
for it.
Bunche’s pioneering
effort in international
peacekeeping was his
proudest achievement. He
set up and led the 20,000
strong U.N. peacekeeping
operation dispatched to theCongo in 1960, and took
the lead in forming a similar
force in Cyprus in 1964. After
Hammarskjold died in an
air crash in Africa, Bunche
became the indispensableadviser of Hammarskjold’s
successor, U Thant of Burma— so indispensable that U
Thant’s entreaties prevented
Bunche from retiring fromthe United Nations toimmerse himself full time inthe civil rights movement.
Bunche died, from overwork
and the effects of diabetes, on
December 9, 1971.

Ralph Bunche caredpassionately about getting
things done, but very little
about getting personal credit.
(He even tried to refuse
the Nobel Peace Prize.)
His great achievements are
remembered, but seldom
his role in them. African
Americans, the millions
liberated from the oldcolonial world, and theUnited Nations itself areparticularly in his debt. He
was one of the greatest public
servants of the 20th century.

By Brian Urquhart
A former UndersecretaryGeneral of the United
Nations, Urquhart is theauthor of Hammarskjöld,
A Life in Peace and War,
Ralph Bunche: An American
Odyssey, and other historicalstudies.

Jackie Robinson:

Breaking the Color Barrier

T

he Brooklyn Dodgers
arrived at Shibe Park,
bringing their new
lightning rod of controversy
to the baseball stadium in
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania— a black player named Jackie
Robinson. The symbols of
intolerance flew down fromthe crowd, and the wordsof intolerance spilled out
from the home team’s bench.
“Philadelphia was the worst,”
said Ralph Branca, who
was there as a pitcher for
Brooklyn. “They threw blackcats on the field. They threw
watermelon on the field. Ben
Chapman, the Philadelphia
manager, was very vocal,
getting on Jackie.”
It was 1947 in the UnitedStates, and for many thecountry still came in two
shades — black and white.
Some hearts, including manyfrom the South, were long
filled with hate simply overthe color of a person’s skin.
Black people, from theirperspective, didn’t deserve
equal civil rights with whites.
And that had extended to theunofficial-but-understoodidea among baseball officials
and team owners since before
the turn of the century thatthe major leagues were forwhite players only. Blacks
would have to play on theirown circuit, the Negro
leagues.

But then came Robinson,
bursting past the color
barrier on April 15, 1947, as
an infielder for the team in
the racially diverse New York
City borough of Brooklyn. He
became a pioneering symbolthat transcended sports, alarge first step on a lengthy
path toward driving homethe concept of equality. His
teammate Branca explained
how Robinson’s achievementtranscended the baseballdiamond:I’ve often said that itchanged baseball, but
it also changed thecountry and eventuallychanged the world … ..
Jackie made it easier for

Top: After a Brooklyn victory over the New York Yankees in the first game of the1952 World Series, Jackie Robinson (front right) celebrates with teammates
Joe Black (back left), Duke Snyder (front left), and Pee Wee Reese (back right).
Team manager Chuck Dressen is at center.
Above: Jackie Robinson (right) and former boxing heavyweight champion
Floyd Patterson (left) meet in Birmingham, Alabama with civil rights leaders
Ralph D. Abernathy and Martin Luther King Jr., 1963.

FREE AT LAST: THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT 33

Rosa Parks. He made iteasier for Martin LutherKing Jr. And he madeit easier for any black
leader who was going to
strive for racial equality.
It basically changed theattitude of the wholecountry as far as looking
at blacks.
It happened on the team.
We had southern guys
who grew up in that setof mores who looked
down on blacks. They
[African Americans] had
to ride in the back of thebus, and they couldn’t
drink at the same water
fountains, couldn’t go to
the same [bathrooms].
They [the white players]
eventually changed
their minds.
Born in Cairo, Georgia, onJanuary 31, 1919, Robinson
grew up in Pasadena,
California. He excelled atfour sports while in college
at the nearby University ofCalifornia at Los Angeles— baseball, football,basketball, and track. The
U.S. Army drafted him in
1942. The military was still
segregated (President Harry
S. Truman would order its
desegregation in 1948); when
the proud Robinson refused
to ride in the back of a bus, he
was brought up on militarycharges of insubordination.

But he was acquitted
and earned an honorable
discharge. “He was a personof action,” says his widow,
Rachel Robinson. “He didn’t
want to be complacent about
our situation.”
Meanwhile, the Brooklyn
Dodgers’ general manager,
Branch Rickey, decided it
was time to integrate thenational pastime of baseball,not least because he believedthat African-American
players would give his club
a competitive advantage.
Rickey understood that his
man would have to possess
the fortitude and strength ofcharacter to withstand theinevitable racist taunts — andworse — of players and fans.
Rickey scouted Robinson in
1945, playing for Kansas Cityin the Negro leagues, anddecided that he had foundsuch a player, and such a man.
Robinson spent the next
season with the Dodgers’
minor-league team inMontreal, and then was
promoted to the Dodgers forthe 1947 season. It wasn’t easy
being a pioneer. Rickey madeRobinson promise for three
years not to respond to theinsults that came at him fromfans around the league andthe opposing teams. Enduring
pressure experienced by
no player before or since,
Robinson excelled on thefield.

34 FREE AT LAST: THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT

In his first major-league
season, at the age of 28,
Robinson played first baseand compiled a .297 batting
average. He displayed adynamic style by stealinga National League-leading
29 bases, won the league’s
Rookie of the Year award, andhelped the team reach theWorld Series. It helped that
other teams acknowledgedthat Robinson had given
the Dodgers a real edge andbegan themselves signingand playing black players. His
best season came in 1949:
He played second base andbatted .342 with 16 homeruns, 124 runs batted in, and37 stolen bases, earning theleague’s Most Valuable Playeraward.
In all, Robinson spent 10
seasons with the Dodgers
and made six World Series
appearances, including
Brooklyn’s one and only
championship year of 1955.
After the following season,
the six-time All-Star retired
rather than go along with a
trade to the rival New York
Giants. In 1962, Robinson was
inducted into the BaseballHall of Fame, the first black
player so honored.
After his playing career
ended, Robinson continued
to help in the fight for racialequality, speaking up for civilrights and for the leading
men and organizationsin the movement. This
included service on the
Board of Directors of the

National Association for the
Advancement of Colored
People.
In 1972, Jackie Robinson
suffered a heart attack anddied, age 53. In those 53 years,
Robinson impacted millionsof lives. He shamed the bigot,
inspired African Americans,and through his unflagging
example of resilience anddignity moved Americans of
all stripes toward acceptanceof African-American civilrights.
“A life is not important,”
Robinson himself said,“except in the impact it has onother lives.”

By Brian Heyman
The winner of over 30
journalism awards, Brian
Heyman is a sportswriter at
The Journal-News in White
Plains, New York.

—5 —“We Have a Movement”

T

he successful boycott of segregated busesin Montgomery, Alabama — which beganwith the arrest of Rosa Parks on December
1, 1955 — transformed the civil rights
cause into a mass political movement. It demonstrated
that African Americans could unite and engage indisciplined political action, and marked the emergence ofMartin Luther King Jr. — the indispensable leader who
inspired millions, held them to the high moral standardof nonviolent resistance, and built bridges between
Americans of all races, creeds, and colors. While many
brave activists contributed to the civil rights revolution of the
1960s, it was King who, more than any other individual, forced
millions of white Americans to confront directly the realityof Jim Crow — and shaped the political reality in which thelandmark Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of1965 could become law.

“Tired of Giving In”: The Montgomery Bus Boycott
Rosa Parks would later say of the day that changed her life:“The only tired I was was tired of giving in.” A secondaryschool graduate at a time when diplomas were hard to comeAbove: Dr. King outlines strategies for theboycott of Montgomery, Alabama, buses.
Among his advisors is Rosa Parks, seatedsecond from left in the front row.
Left: After Rosa Parks refused to give up
her bus seat, she was arrested, booked,
and jailed. Her booking photo was
discovered nearly a half-century later,
during a house cleaning of the sheriff’s
office.

by for blacks in the South, Parks was active in her local
NAACP, a registered voter (another privilege held by few
southern blacks), and a respected figure in Montgomery,
Alabama. In the summer of 1955, she attended an interracial
leadership conference at the Highlander Folk School, aTennessee institution that trained labor organizers anddesegregation advocates. Parks thus knew of efforts toimprove the lot of African Americans and that she was wellsuited to provide a test case should the occasion arise.
On December 1, 1955, Parks was employed as aseamstress at a local department store. When she rode homefrom work that afternoon, she sat in the first row of the“colored section” of seats between the “white” and “black”
FREE AT LAST: THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT 35

rows. When the white seats filled, the driver ordered Parks togive up her seat when another white person boarded the bus.
Parks refused. She was arrested, jailed, and ultimately fined$10, plus $4 in court costs. Parks was 42 years old; she hadcrossed the line into direct political action.
An outraged black community formed the Montgomery
Improvement Association (MIA) to organize a boycott of
the city bus system. Partly to forestall rivalries among local
community leaders, citizens turned to a recent arrival toMontgomery, the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. The newlyinstalled pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, Kingwas just 26 years old but he had been born to leadership:
His father, the Reverend Martin Luther King Sr., headed theinfluential Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, was active in
the Georgia chapter of the NAACP, and had since the 1920s
refused to ride Atlanta’s segregated bus system.
In his ﬁrst speech to MIA, the younger King told
the group:
We have no alternative but to protest. For many years wehave shown an amazing patience. We have sometimes given
our white brothers the feeling that we liked the way we werebeing treated. But we come here tonight to be saved fromthat patience that makes us patient with anything less than
freedom and justice.
Under King’s leadership, boycotters organized carpools,
while black taxi drivers charged boycotters the same fare — 10cents — they would have paid on the bus. By auto, by horseand-buggy, and even simply by walking, direct, nonviolent
political action forced the city to pay a heavy economic pricefor its segregationist ways.
It also made a national figure of King, whose powerfulpresence and unsurpassed oratorical skills drew publicity
for the movement and attracted support from sympathetic
whites, especially those in the North. King, Time magazine
later concluded, had “risen from nowhere to become oneof the nation’s remarkable leaders of men.”
Even after his house was attacked and King himself,along with more than 100 boycotters, was arrested for“hindering a bus,” his continued grace and adherence tononviolent tactics earned respect for the movement anddiscredited the segregationists of Montgomery. Whenan explosion shook King’s house with his wife and baby
daughter inside, it briefly appeared that a riot would
ensue. But King calmed the crowd:that … preacher, and so do all the other white people who
were there.”In the end, the desegregation of the Montgomery bus
system required not only Rosa Parks’s personal initiative andbravery and King’s political leadership, but also an NAACPstyle legal effort. As the boycotters braved segregationist
opposition, desegregationist attorneys cited the precedent ofBrown v. Board of Education in their court challenge to theMontgomery bus ordinance. In November 1956, the Supreme
Court of the United States rejected the city’s final appeal, andthe segregation of Montgomery buses ended. Thus fortified,the civil rights movement moved on to new battles.

Sit-Ins
Shortly after the successful conclusion of the Montgomery
bus boycott, Martin Luther King and a number of senior
movement figures — the Reverends Ralph Abernathy, T.J.
Jemison, Joseph Lowery, Fred Shuttlesworth, and C.K. Steele,
and the activists Ella Baker and Bayard Rustin — founded theSouthern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). This new
civil rights organization was devoted to a more aggressive
approach than that of the legally oriented NAACP. The SCLC
launched “Crusade for Citizenship,” a voter registration effort.
Younger activists, meanwhile, were growing impatientwith King’s gradualist tactics. In 1960, some 200 of them,including Howard University student Stokley Carmichael,
formed the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, or
SNCC. And in Greensboro, North Carolina, four freshmanat the all-black North Carolina Agricultural and TechnicalCollege took matters into their own hands.
At 4:30 p.m. on February 1, 1960, students Ezell Blair
Jr. (now Jibreel Khazan), Franklin Eugene McCain, Joseph
Alfred McNeil, and David Leinail took whites-only seats at
a local Woolworth department store lunch counter. They
were denied service, but sat quietly until the store closed

We want to love our enemies — be good to them. This
is what we must live by, we must meet hate with love.
We must love our white brothers no matter what they
do to us.
A white Montgomery policeman later told a journalist:“I’ll be honest with you, I was terrified. I owe my life to
36 FREE AT LAST: THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT

A Montgomery, Alabama, sit-in, 1961. Merely by sitting quietly at segregatedlunch counters, civil rights activists risked arrest … and much worse.

a civil rights activist and missionary who had served inIndia and studied Gandhian satyagraha, or nonviolent
resistance. King urged Lawson to relocate to the South:“Come now,” King said. “We don’t have anyone like you
down there.”Working with King’s Southern Christian
Leadership Conference, Lawson in 1958 began totrain a new generation of nonviolent activists. His
students included Diane Nash, James Bevel, and John
Lewis, today a U.S. representative from Georgia. Allsoon would assume prominence in the civil rights
movement. At these training seminars, they agreed tostage a series of sit-ins at department store restaurants.
Blacks were permitted to spend money in those stores,
but not to eat at their restaurants.
The Nashville activists organized carefully andmoved deliberately. But when the Greensboro sit-inbegan to draw national attention, they were ready. In
February 1960, hundreds of their activists began the sitins. Their student-drafted instruction sheets captured
the personal discipline and dignified commitment tononviolence they would offer the world:
Don’t strike back or curse back if abused. … Don’t block
entrances to the stores and aisles.
The labor leader A. Philip Randolph (right) founded and led
the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, which offered many African
Americans a rare pathway to middle-class employment. Randolph’s
threatened 1941 march on Washington forced President Franklin D. Roosevelt
to bar racial discrimination by defense contractors and served as the modelfor the famous 1963 march.

an hour later. The next morning, 20 Negro students took
lunch-counter seats in groups of three or four. “There wasno disturbance,” the Greensboro Record reported, “and there
appeared to be no conversation except among the groups.
Some students pulled out books and appeared to be studying.”
Blair told the newspaper that Negro adults “have been
complacent and fearful. … It is time for someone to wake up
and change the situation … and we decided to start here.”
The nonviolent occupation of a public space, or sit-in,
dated at least to Mahatma Gandhi’s campaigns for Indian
independence from Britain. In the United States, labororganizations and the northern-based Congress of Racial
Equality (CORE) had employed sit-ins as well. As events inGreensboro began to draw attention, SNCC moved swiftly to
associate itself with this civil rights tactic, and over the next
two months, sit-ins spread to more than 50 cities.
Particularly significant were events in Nashville,
Tennessee, where the King-affiliated Nashville Christian
Leadership Council had been preparing for this moment. Backin 1955, King had reached out to the Reverend James Lawson,

Show yourself friendly and courteous at all times.
Sit straight and always face the counter. …
Remember the teachings of Jesus Christ, Mohandas K.
Gandhi, and Martin Luther King.
Remember love and nonviolence, may God bless eachof you.
Typically a lunch counter would close when a sit-inbegan, but after the first few incidents, police began to arrest
protestors, and the subsequent trials drew large crowds.
When convicted of disorderly conduct, the activists chose toserve jail time rather than pay a fine.
Nashville was an early example of how Jim Crow
could not survive exposure. The legendary journalist DavidHalberstam was just beginning his career, and his reports
for the Nashville Tennessean helped attract national media
attention. The sit-in movement spread throughout much of thecountry, and soon Americans across the nation were stunnedby photographs like the one that appeared in the February 28,
1960 New York Times. The caption read: “A white man swings
an 18-inch-long [46-centimeter-long] bat at a Negro woman
in Montgomery. She was injured by the blow. The attack
occurred yesterday after the woman brushed against anotherwhite man. Police, standing near by, made no arrest.”

FREE AT LAST: THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT 37

On April 19 of that year, a bomb exploded at the homeof the Nashville students’ chief legal counsel. Some 2,000
African Americans swiftly organized a march to the City
Hall, where they confronted the mayor. Would he, Diane
Nash asked, favor ending lunch-counter segregation? Yes,came the reply, but, “I can’t tell a man how to run his business.
He has got rights too.”This “right” to discriminate lay at the heart of the struggle.
Meanwhile, the bad publicity stung the businessmen of
Nashville, as did the stark contrast between the dignified,nonviolent black students and their armed and all-too-violent
opponents. Secret negotiations began, and on May 10, 1960,
quietly and without fanfare, a number of downtown lunch
counters began serving black customers. There were nofurther incidents, and soon thereafter Nashville became thefirst southern city successfully to begin desegregating its
public facilities.

Freedom Rides
Some of the young Nashville sit-in leaders joined up with theStudent Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, which in 1961
helped to launch the “Freedom Rides.” Back in 1946, Thurgood
Marshall’s NAACP lawyers had obtained a Supreme Court
ruling that barred segregation in interstate bus travel. (Under
the U.S. federal system of government, it is easier for thenational government to regulate commerce that crosses
state lines.) In the 1960 Boynton v. Virginia decision, theCourt expanded its ruling to include bus terminals and otherfacilities associated with interstate travel. But possessing aright and exercising it are two very different things.
It was widely understood that any African American
who exercised his or her constitutional right to sit at thefront of an interstate bus or use the previously whites-only
facilities at a southern bus terminal would meet with a violent
response. Understanding this, an interracial group of 13,
including CORE National Director James Farmer, departed
Washington, D.C., by bus. Farmer and his companions
planned to make several stops en route to New Orleans. “Ifthere is arrest, we will accept that arrest,” Farmer said. “Andif there is violence, we are willing to receive that violence
without responding in kind.”
Farmer was right to anticipate violence. Perhaps the worst
of it occurred near Anniston, Alabama. Departing Atlanta,
the Freedom Riders had split into two groups, one riding in
a Greyhound bus, the other in a Trailways bus. When the
Greyhound bus reached Anniston, the sidewalks, unusually,
were lined with people. The reason soon became clear. Whenthe bus reached the station parking lot, a mob set upon it,
using rocks and brass knuckles to shatter some of the bus
windows. Two white highway patrolmen in the bus, assigned
to spy on the Riders, sealed the door and prevented the Ku
Klux Klan-led mob from entering.
When the local police finally arrived, they bantered withthe crowd, made no arrests, and escorted the bus to the city
limits. The mob, by some accounts now about 200 strong,followed close behind in cars and pickup trucks. About 10
kilometers outside Anniston, flat tires brought the bus to a
halt. A crowd of white men attempted to board the bus, andone threw a fire bomb through a bus window. As the historianRaymond Arsenault writes: “The Freedom Riders had been
all but doomed until an exploding fuel tank convinced themob that the whole bus was about to explode.” The bus was
consumed by the blaze; the fleeing Freedom Riders, reported
the Associated Press, “took a brief but bloody beating.”

Boarding a June, 1961 Freedom Ride from Washington, D.C., toFlorida are the Rev. Perry A. Smith III, of Brentwood, Maryland,
and Rev. Robert Stone of New York City.
Left: A Trailways bus with Freedom Riders aboard approaches thebus terminal in Jackson, Mississippi.
38 FREE AT LAST: THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT

Freedom Riders traveling from Montgomery, Alabama, to Jackson,
Mississippi, are escorted by National Guardsmen with bayonets at the ready.
Over 20 additional Freedom Riders are behind the guardsmen.

The second group of Freedom Riders shared their
Trailways bus with a group of Klansmen who boarded atAtlanta. When the black Freedom Riders refused to sit at theback of the bus, more beatings ensued. The white Freedom
Riders, among them 61-year-old educator Walter Bergman,
were attacked with particular savagery. All of the Freedom
Riders held to their Ghandian training; none fought back.
When the bus at last arrived in Birmingham, matters only
grew worse. CBS News commentator Howard K. Smith
offered an eyewitness account: “When the bus arrived, thetoughs grabbed the passengers into alleys and corridors,
pounding them with pipes, with key rings, and with fists.”
Inside the segregated bus station, the Freedom Riders
hesitated momentarily, then entered the whites-only waiting
room. They, too, were beaten, some unconscious, while
Birmingham’s police chief, Eugene “Bull” Connor, refused torestrain the Klansmen and their supporters.
Still, the Riders were determined to continue. In
Washington, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy asked
Alabama Governor John Patterson to guarantee safe passage
through his state. Patterson declined: “The citizens of the state
are so enraged I cannot guarantee protection for this bunchof rabble-rousers.” A member of Alabama’s congressionaldelegation, Representative George Huddleston Jr., deemed theFreedom Riders “self-anointed merchants of racial hatred.”
He said the firebombed Greyhound group “got just what they
asked for.”In Nashville, Diane Nash feared the politicalconsequences. “If the Freedom Ride had been stopped as aresult of violence,” she later said, “I strongly felt that the futureof the movement was going to be just cut short because

the impression would have been giventhat whenever a movement starts, that
all that has to be done is that you attack
it with massive violence and the blacks
would stop.” With reinforcements fromthe Student Nonviolent Coordinating
Committee and other black and white
activists supplementing the original
Freedom Riders, a new effort was launched.
On May 20, a group of Freedom Riders
boarded a Birmingham-to-Montgomery,
Alabama, Greyhound. Their bus wasmet by a mob estimated at 1,000 “within
an instant” of pulling into the station,
the Associated Press reported. Amongthe injured were John Seigenthaler, anassistant to Attorney General Kennedy.
Kennedy dispatched 400 federal marshals to Montgomery to
enforce order, while the Congress of Racial Equality promised
to continue the Freedom Ride, pressing on to Jackson,
Mississippi, and then to New Orleans. “Many students are
standing by in other cities to serve as volunteers if needed,”
James Farmer told the New York Times. And some 450
Americans did step forward, boarding the buses and thenfilling the jails, notably in Jackson, when Farmer and others
refused to pay fines imposed for “breaching the peace.”
On May 29, Attorney General Kennedy directed theInterstate Commerce Commission to adopt stiff regulations
to enforce the integration of interstate transportation. The
agency did so. With this sustained federal effort, Jim Crowfaltered in bus terminals, on buses, and on trains, at least thosethat crossed state lines.
The Freedom Riders’ victory set the tone for the great
civil rights campaigns that followed. Not for the first time
during these climactic years, a free press forced Americans totake a cold, hard look at the reality of racial oppression. The
Birmingham mob beat Tommy Langston, a photographer forthe local Post-Herald newspaper, and smashed his camera. But
they forgot to remove the ﬁlm, and the newspaper’s front page
subsequently displayed his picture of the savage beating of a
black bystander. Each arrest and each beating attracted more
media and more coverage. And while many of those accounts
still referred to “Negro militants,” the contrast between rabid
white mobs and the calm, dignified, biracial Freedom Riders
forced Americans to decide, or at this point at least begin
deciding: Who best represented American values?
White religious leaders were prominent among those
who lauded the bravery of the Freedom Riders and thejustice of their cause. The Reverend Billy Graham called forprosecution of their attackers and declared it “deplorable
when certain people in any society have been treated as
FREE AT LAST: THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT 39

second-class citizens.” Rabbi Bernard J.
Bamberger denounced white segregationist
violence as “utterly indefensible in terms of
morality and law” and criticized whites who
urged civil rights activists to “go slow.” And
always there were the righteous: RaymondArsenault writes that while the Greyhoundbus burned outside Anniston, “one little girl,12-year-old Janie Miller, supplied the choking
victims with water, filling and refilling afive-gallon [19-liter] bucket while braving theinsults and taunts of Klansmen.”

The Albany Movement
Two major civil rights campaigns during 1962
and 1963 would illustrate both the limits
and the possibilities of nonviolent resistance.
African Americans in the segregatedcity of Albany, Georgia, had traditionallyengaged in as much political activism as was
possible in the Jim Crow South. In 1961, SNCC volunteers
arrived to beef up an ongoing voter registration effort. They
established a voter-registration center that served as a homebase for a campaign of sit-ins, boycotts, and other protests. In
November 1961, a number of local black organizations formed
the Albany Movement, under the leadership of William
G. Anderson, a young osteopath. The protests accelerated,and by mid-December more than 500 demonstrators had
been jailed. Anderson had met both Martin Luther King Jr.
and his colleague, the Reverend Ralph Abernathy, pastor at
Montgomery’s First Baptist Church and King’s chief lieutenant
at the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. He decided
to invite King’s help, both to maintain the Albany Movement’s
momentum and to secure national publicity for its cause.
Albany Police Chief Laurie Pritchett proved a formidable
opponent for King and the other activists. Pritchett realizedthat news media coverage of segregationist violence against
dignified, nonviolent civil rights activists already had turned
many Americans against Jim Crow. Pritchett worked
assiduously to deprive the Albany Movement of a similar“media moment.” Albany police officers were warned against
employing any kind of violence against protestors, especially if
the press was nearby. While earlier protestors had successfully“filled the jails,” Pritchett scattered them in jails throughout
the surrounding counties. “In the end,” the New Georgia
Encyclopedia concluded, “King ran out of willing marchers
before Pritchett ran out of jail space.”
Pritchett also understood that King was the media starand that national press coverage would ebb if there was no
King “angle” to pursue. King returned several times to Albany,and several times was arrested and convicted for breach of
40 FREE AT LAST: THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT

Montgomery, Alabama: about 70 clergymen of different creeds anddenominations being arrested after holding an anti-segregation prayer vigil
in front of city hall, August 1962.

the peace. When the court offered King and Abernathy theirchoice of jail time or a fine, they chose jail, the option certain
to attract press coverage. But they found that an “anonymous
benefactor” — a segregationist recruited by Pritchett — had
paid their fine.
When the media moment finally came, it was not the one
King had hoped for. By July 24, 1962, many of Albany’s African
Americans had grown frustrated at the lack of progress. That
evening, a crowd of 2,000 blacks armed with bricks, bottles,
and rocks attacked a group of Albany policemen and Georgia
highway patrolmen. One trooper lost two teeth. But Laurie
Pritchett’s well-schooled officers did not retaliate, and thechief was quick to seize the initiative: “Did you see themnonviolent rocks?” he asked.
King moved swiftly to limit the damage. He cancelled aplanned mass demonstration and declared a day of penance.
But a federal injunction against further demonstrations in
Albany added to the difficulties: Up till then, the civil rights
cause had had the law on its side. Further action in Albany
would allow segregationists to portray King and his followers
as lawbreakers.
King understood that his presence in Albany would nolonger help the wider movement. SNCC, NAACP, CORE, andother local activists continued the fight in Albany and would
eventually secure real gains for the city’s African Americans.
For King and his SCLC team, Albany was a learning
experience. As King explained in his autobiography:

When we planned our strategy for Birmingham months
later, we spent many hours assessing Albany and trying
to learn from its errors. Our appraisals not only helped tomake our subsequent tactics more effective, but revealed
that Albany was far from an unqualified failure.

Arrest in Birmingham
If Albany Police Chief Laurie Pritchett possessed the politicalsavvy and emotional detachment to fight nonviolence with
nonviolence, his Birmingham, Alabama, counterpart, Bull
Connor, did not. King and the other movement leaders rightly
anticipated that Connor would prove a perfect foil. King
biographer Marshall Frady depicted Connor as “a bombastic
segregationist of the old, unapologetically bluff sort — apodgy, strutful, middle-aged bossman in a snap-brim straw
hat who … held a famously irascible temper.” Connor did
not represent the views of all white Birmingham residents; arecent municipal election had produced gains for reformist
candidates. But he controlled the police, and the “greeting”
that the Freedom Riders had experienced in Birmingham
amply illustrated what activists might expect to find there.
Albany had taught King and his SCLC team to focus on
specific goals rather than a general desegregation. As King
later wrote:
We concluded that in hard-core communities, a more
effective battle could be waged if it was concentrated
against one aspect of the evil and intricate systemof segregation. We decided, therefore, to center the
Birmingham struggle on the business community, for weknew that the Negro population had sufficient buying
power so that its withdrawal could make the difference
between profit and loss for many businesses.

On April 3, 1963, activists launched a round of lunchcounter sit-ins. A march on Birmingham’s City Hall followedon the 6th. The city’s African Americans began to boycott
downtown businesses, a tactic King deemed “amazingly
effective.” A number of shops swiftly removed their whitesonly signs, only to be threatened by Bull Connor with the lossof their business licenses. As the numbers of volunteers grew,
the Birmingham movement expanded its efforts to “kneel-ins”
in local church buildings and library sit-ins. The number ofarrests grew and the jails filled.
The police response remained muted to this point. The
New York Times described a typical incident:
Eight Negros entered the segregated library. They strolled
through three of the four floors and sat at desks reading
magazines and books. The police were present but did notorder them to leave. They left voluntarily after about half
an hour.
About 25 whites were in the library when the Negroes
entered. Some made derogatory remarks such as, “It stinks
in here.” Others asked the Negroes: “Why don’t you go
home?” But there were no incidents.
On April 10, Connor followed Pritchett’s example,
obtaining a county court injunction barring King, Fred
Shuttlesworth, and 134 other leaders from engaging in boycotts,
sit-ins, picketing, and other protest activities. Any violation of
the injunction would be contempt of court, punishable by more
substantial jail time than a mere breach of peace.
King now faced a choice. He and Abernathy decided theywould violate the injunction. King issued a brief statement:
We cannot in all good conscience obey such an injunction
which is an unjust, undemocratic, and unconstitutional
misuse of the legal process.
We do this not out of any disrespect for the law but out of
the highest respect for the law. This is not an attempt toevade or defy the law or engage in chaotic anarchy. Just as
in all good conscience we cannot obey unjust laws, neither
can we respect the unjust use of the courts.
We believe in a system of law based on justice and morality.
Out of our great love for the Constitution of the UnitedStates and our desire to purify the judicial system of
the state of Alabama, we risk this critical move with anawareness of the possible consequences involved.

Albany, Georgia: African-American demonstrators kneel in prayer during a
December 1961 hearing for Freedom Riders arrested there.

On Good Friday, April 12, 1963, Martin Luther King led
a protest march toward downtown Birmingham. On the fifth
block, King, Abernathy, and about 60 others, including a whiteclergyman who joined the protest, were arrested. As King was
taken into custody, Connor remarked: “That’s what he came
down here for, to get arrested. Now he’s got it.”
FREE AT LAST: THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT 41

Letter From Birmingham Jail“We Have a Movement”

As King languished in his jail cell, he produced one of themost extraordinary documents in the history of American
thought. A number of local white clergymen, themselves
friendly to King’s long-term objectives, disagreed with his
short-term tactics. They published a public statement calling
the King-led demonstrations “unwise and untimely,” andthey opposed King’s civil disobedience “however technicallypeaceful those actions may be.”King’s reply was the Letter From Birmingham Jail. Lacking
writing paper, he scribbled in the margins of a newspaper
page. King’s handwritten words wrapped around the pest
control ads and garden club news, recalled the King aide who
smuggled the newsprint out of the jail. Yet those margins helda powerful condemnation of inaction in the face of injustice,and they displayed an extraordinary faith that in America thecause of freedom necessarily would prevail.
King answered the white pastors’ charges with timeless,universal truth. Accused of being an outsider fomenting
tension in Birmingham, King replied that, in the face of
oppression, there were no outsiders. “Injustice anywhere is athreat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable
network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny.
Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.” As forthe tension: “There is a type of constructive, nonviolent
tension which is necessary for growth.” For those who do notthemselves suffer from the disease of segregation, King added,
no direct action ever seems well timed: “ ‘Wait’ has almost
always meant ‘Never.’” No man, he continued, can “set the
timetable for another man’s freedom.”Acknowledging that he and his followers had indeed
violated the county court injunction, King cited Saint
Augustine’s distinction between just and unjust laws. He
asserted that one who breaks an unjust law in order to arouse
the consciousness of his community “is in reality expressing
the highest respect for law,” provided he acts “openly, lovingly,
and with a willingness to accept the penalty.” Writing from his
cell, King led by example.
From that cell, King believed that in the United States,
freedom ultimately would —indeed, must — prevail: “Ihave no fear about the outcome of our struggle. … We willreach the goal of freedom ... because the goal of America is
freedom. … Our destiny is tied up with America’s destiny ...
the sacred heritage of our nation and the eternal will of God
are embodied in our echoing demands. … One day,” King
concluded, “the South will recognize its real heroes.”

Because the Birmingham campaign required their leadership,
Martin Luther King Jr. and Ralph Abernathy posted bondafter eight days in jail. They turned to an idea credited to the
Reverend James Bevel, a Nashville sit-in and Freedom Ride
veteran recruited by King to serve as Southern Christian
Leadership Conference’s director of direct action andnonviolent education. Knowing that few black families could
afford to have their primary wage earner serve jail time, Bevel
began to organize the city’s young African Americans. College
students, secondary schoolers, and even elementary school
pupils were instructed in the principles of nonviolence. They
prepared to march downtown, there to enter whites-only
lunch counters, use the whites-only drinking fountains, study
in the whites-only libraries, pray in the whites-only churches.
In some denominations, at least, white churches welcomed
the young blacks.
The decision to use children was a controversial one. The
SCLC’s executive director, the Reverend Wyatt Tee Walker,
defended it on the grounds that “Negro children will get abetter education in five days in jail than in five months in asegregated school.” In his Autobiography, King related the caseof a black teenager who decided to march in the face of his
father’s objections:

42 FREE AT LAST: THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT“Daddy,” the boy said, “I don’t want to disobey you, but I
have made my pledge. If you try to keep me home, I willsneak off. If you think I deserve to be punished for that, I’ll
just have to take the punishment. For, you see, I’m not doing
this only because I want to be free. I’m doing it also because
I want freedom for you and Mama, and I want it to comebefore you die.”That father thought again, and gave his son his blessing.
On May 2, 1963, hundreds of young African Americans
set out, linked by walkie-talkie, singing “We Shall Overcome.”
Hundreds were arrested, swelling the Birmingham jail wellbeyond its capacity. Perhaps most importantly, they stretched
Bull Connor’s temper to its breaking point.
On May 3, Connor determined to halt thedemonstrations by force. Fire hoses set to full pressure —enough to peel bark from a tree — knocked protestors off theirfeet and rolled them down the asphalt streets. At the police
chief’s order, police dogs were used to disperse the crowds,
and several demonstrators were bitten.
Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee activist
James Foreman was at SCLC headquarters when the news
came. He reported that the leaders there were “jumping up
and down, elated. … They said over and over again, ‘We’ve
got a movement. We’ve got a movement. We had somepolice brutality.’ ” Foreman thought this “very cold, cruel,and calculating,” but, as the historian C. Vann Woodwardconcluded: “The more seasoned campaigners had learned theprice and worth of photographic opportunities.”
The young demonstrators returned each day that week, as
did the hoses and the dogs. The resulting photographs, video,
and written accounts dominated the news in the UnitedStates and in much of the world. Faced with the greatest
provocation, most demonstrators remained nonviolent. James
Bevel roamed the streets, shouting through a bullhorn: “Ifyou’re not going to demonstrate in a nonviolent way, thenleave.” By May 6, Bull Connor was housing thousands of childprisoners at the state fairgrounds.
A New York Times editorial expressed the feeling ofgrowing numbers of Americans:
No American schooled in respect for human dignity
can read without shame of the barbarities committed
by Alabama police authorities against Negro and whitedemonstrators for civil rights. The use of police dogs
and high-pressure fire hose to subdue schoolchildren
in Birmingham is a national disgrace. The herding of
hundreds of teenagers and many not yet in their teens into
jails and detention homes for demanding their birthright of
freedom makes a mockery of legal process.
In Washington, D.C., one very important reader shared
this sentiment. As King biographer Marshall Frady relates:
One news photo of a policeman clutching the shirtfront of a
black youth with one hand while his other held the leash ofa dog swirling at the youth’s midsection happened to passunder the eyes of the president in the Oval Office, and hetold a group of visitors that day, “It makes me sick.”
On May 7, Fred Shuttlesworth was injured by a fire hose
stream that hurled him against the side of his church. Arrivinga few minutes later, Bull Connor declared: “I’m sorry I missed
it. … I wish they’d carried him away in a hearse.”
By May 9, Birmingham’s business leaders had had enough.
They negotiated an agreement with King and Shuttlesworth.
Birmingham businesses would desegregate their lunch
counters, restrooms, and drinking fountains. They would hire
and promote black employees. The jailed protestors would befreed, and charges dropped. Bull Connor called it “the worst
day of my life.”
The triumph of the Birmingham movement reflected thebravery and discipline of the African-American protestors. It
spoke to the inspiring and hard-headed leadership of men like
Martin Luther King Jr., Ralph Abernathy, Fred Shuttlesworth,
James Bevel, and others. It forced Americans to confront
squarely — in their newspapers and on their televisionscreens — the reality of Jim Crow brutality. And it reflected
an idealism that had survived both slavery and segregation,
and also an impatience over promises long deferred. On May
8, a Birmingham juvenile court judge conducted a hearing
on the case of a 15-year-old boy arrested during the May 3
demonstrations:
Judge: I often think of what the Founding Fathers said:“There is no freedom without restraint.” Now I want you togo home and go back to school. Will you do that?
Boy: Can I say something?
Judge: Anything you like.
Boy: Well, you can say that because you’ve got yourfreedom. The Constitution says we’re all equal, but Negroes
aren’t equal.
Judge: But you people have made great gains and they stillare. It takes time.
Boy: We’ve been waiting over 100 years.

The March on Washington

Birmingham, Alabama, May 1963: Fire hoses set to full pressure could strip
the bark from a tree. Sheriff Bull Connor ordered their use against non-violent
civil rights protestors and a horrified nation watched.

Birmingham was a real victory, but a costly one. The longterm solution could not be for African Americans to defeat
segregation one city at a time or by absorbing beatings, dog
bites, and hosings. Even as the civil rights movement scoredreal gains, each advance came over dogged opposition.
Federal troops were needed to ensure the admission ofJames Meredith, the first black to study at the University ofMississippi, in 1962. The following year, Alabama’s governor,
George Wallace, whose inaugural address promised“segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation
forever,” staged a “stand in the schoolhouse door.” Only theintervention of federal marshals ensured the enrollment ofAfrican Americans Vivian Malone and James Hood at the
University of Alabama. The very next day, Medgar Evers,
leader of the Mississippi NAACP, was murdered outside his
FREE AT LAST: THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT 43

home in Jackson. And in Birmingham itself, on September
15, 1963, three Klansmen planted 19 sticks of dynamite in
the basement of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, theunofficial headquarters of the Birmingham movement. Four
young girls — Addie Mae Collins, Carole Robertson, Cynthia
Wesley, and Denise McNair — were killed and 22 injured.
On June 11, 1963, President John F. Kennedy told
the nation that he would submit to Congress legislationprohibiting segregation in all privately owned facilities:
hotels, restaurants, theaters, retail stores, and the like. “We
are confronted primarily,” the president said, “with a moral
issue. It is as old as the scriptures and as clear as the American
Constitution.” But the obstacles to passage of effective civilrights laws remained imposing.
A number of black leaders were determined to change
the political reality in which members of Congress would
consider civil rights legislation. One was A. Philip Randolph.
Now well into his 70s, Randolph had earlier organized and for
decades led the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters union.
African Americans had long supplied large numbers of rail
car attendants. These were among the best jobs open to blacks
in much of the country, and Randolph, as leader of these
porters, had emerged as an important figure in the American
labor movement.
Back in 1941, President Franklin D. Roosevelt had sought
to boost defense production in anticipation of possible U.S.
entry into the Second World War. Randolph confronted
Roosevelt, demanding an end to segregation in federal
government agencies and among defense contractors.
Otherwise, Randolph warned, he would launch a massive
protest march on Washington, D.C. Roosevelt soon issued an
executive order barring discrimination in defense industries
and federal bureaus and creating the Fair Employment
Practices Committee. After the war, pressure from Randolph
contributed to President Harry S Truman’s 1948 orderdesegregating the American armed forces.
Now Randolph and his talented assistant Bayard Rustin
contemplated a similar march, hoping “to embody in one
gesture civil rights as well as national economic demands.” A“Big Six” group of civil rights leaders was formed to organize
the event. Included were Randolph, King, Roy Wilkins(representing the National Association for the Advancementof Colored People), James Farmer (Congress of Racial
Equality), John Lewis (Student Nonviolent Coordinating
Committee), and Whitney Young Jr. (Urban League). They
fixed a date: August 28, 1963, and site for the main rally: theLincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C.
The “March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom” would
be the largest political demonstration the nation had everseen. Chartered buses and trains carried participants fromthroughout the nation. A quarter-million Americans, and by
44 FREE AT LAST: THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT

some estimates even more, gathered that day, among them atleast 50,000 whites. On the podium stood a stellar assemblageof civil rights champions, Christian and Jewish religious
leaders, labor chiefs, and entertainers. The black contralto
Marian Anderson, who had performed at the Lincoln
Memorial in 1939 after being refused permission to sing at
Washington’s Constitution Hall, offered the national anthem.
Each of the Big Six addressed the crowd that day, except for
Farmer, who had been arrested during a protest in Louisiana.
The best-remembered moment would be King’s.
Considered by many the finest oration ever delivered by an
American, King’s “I Have a Dream” speech drew on themes
from the Bible and from such iconic American texts as theConstitution, the Declaration of Independence, and Abraham
Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. King organized his remarks inthe style and structure of a sermon, the kind he had deliveredat many a Sunday morning church service.
The speech began by linking the civil rights cause
to earlier promises unfulfilled. Lincoln’s Emancipation
Proclamation, King said, appeared to the freed slaves as “ajoyous daybreak to end the long night of their captivity.” But
100 years later, he continued, “the Negro … finds himself an
exile in his own land.” When the nation’s founders wrote the
Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, “they weresigning a promissory note to which every American was tofall heir. This note was a promise that all men, yes, black men
as well as white men, would be guaranteed the ‘unalienable
rights’ of ‘life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.’ ”
America, King continued, had defaulted on thatpromissory note, at least to her citizens of color.
We refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt. We
refuse to believe that there are insufficient funds in the great
vaults of opportunity of this nation. And so, we’ve come to

The “Big Six” meet in New York to plan the March on Washington. Left toright: John Lewis, Whitney Young, A. Philip Randolph, Martin Luther King Jr.,James Farmer, and Roy Wilkins.

cash this check, a check that will give us upon demand theriches of freedom and the security of justice.
“There will be neither rest nor tranquility in America
until the Negro is granted his citizenship rights,” King warned,
but he also noted thatin the process of gaining our rightful place, we must not
be guilty of wrongful deeds. Let us not seek to satisfy ourthirst for freedom by drinking from the cup of bitterness
and hatred. We must forever conduct our struggle on thehigh plane of dignity and discipline. We must not allow ourcreative protest to degenerate into physical violence.
Some believe that King spoke extemporaneously as hedelivered the “dream” portion of his address. The famed gospel
singer Mahalia Jackson was on the stage while King spoke,and she addressed him during the speech: “Tell them about
the dream, Martin,” she said. And he did.
… and so even though we face the difficulties of today andtomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted
in the American dream.

I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live
out the true meaning of its creed: “We hold these truths to
be self-evident, that all men are created equal.”
I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia, thesons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners
will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.
I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi,
a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering withthe heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of
freedom and justice.
I have a dream that my four little children will one day live
in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of
their skin but by the content of their character.
I have a dream today!
As the words and images of the day’s events sped acrossthe nation and around the world, momentum for real change
accelerated. But there were battles still to be fought, andvictory, while ever closer, still lay in the distance.

“I have a dream today!” Martin Luther King addresses the largest politicaldemonstration the nation had ever seen. For many, his speech in 1963
was the finest ever delivered by an American.

FREE AT LAST: THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT 45

Rosa Parks:

Mother of the Civil Rights MovementR

osa McCauley Parks
is known today as the“mother of the civilrights movement” because
her arrest for refusing togive up her bus seat sparked
the pivotal Montgomery,
Alabama, bus boycott. She
didn’t set out to make history
when she left her job as aseamstress to board a bus on
the afternoon of December 1,
1955. She was tired, and shejust wanted to go home. Still,when the bus driver asked her
to move toward the back of
the bus so that a white man
could sit, she couldn’t bringherself to do it.
“I didn’t get on the bus
with the intention of beingarrested,” she said later. “I got
on the bus with the intentionof going home.”
While she did not know
her act would set in motion
a 381-day bus boycott, sheknew one thing. Her own
personal bus boycott beganthat day.
“I knew that as far as I wasconcerned, I would never ride
on a segregated bus again.”
The arrest and brief jailingof Rosa Parks, a woman
highly respected in the black
community, and the boycottthat followed led to a U.S.
Supreme Court decision
outlawing segregation oncity buses. The boycott also
raised to national prominencea youthful, little-known
minister named Martin
Luther King Jr. Under his
leadership, the boycott set a

Above: Rosa Parks seated at the front of
the bus, after the Supreme Court of theUnited States ruled unconstitutional thesegregated seating that had prevailed on
the Montgomery, Alabama, bus system.
Parks’s December 1955 refusal to giveup her seat to a white man sparked theMontgomery Bus Boycott and launched thecivil rights career of Martin Luther King Jr.
Right: Rosa Parks being fingerprinted after
her arrest.

46 FREE AT LAST: THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT

pattern for nonviolent,community-based protestthat became a successful
strategy in the civil rights
movement.
There were many forcesin Rosa Parks’s early lifethat helped forge her quiet
activism. She was born
Rosa Louise McCauley on
February 4, 1913, in Tuskegee,
Alabama. Her childhood
revolved around a small
church where her uncle
was the pastor. There she
developed both a strong
faith and a sense of racial
pride. Parks later in life spoke
proudly of the fact that theAfrican Methodist Episcopal
Church had for generations
been a strong advocate forblack equality.
She also was strongly
influenced by her
grandparents, especially her
grandfather. He responded
to the family’s fears of theviolent, racist, secret society
known as the Ku Klux
Klan by keeping a loaded
double-barreled shotgun
nearby. While the very realpossibility of Klan violence
never materialized forher immediate family, her
grandfather’s defiant attitude
helped mold her thinking.
When she turned 11, Rosa
was sent to a school for girls
in Montgomery that had an
all-black student body andan all-white teaching staff.

At the school, Parks learned“to believe we could do what
we wanted in life.” She also
learned from the teachersthat not all white people
were bigots.
It was there she met
Johnnie Carr, and the two
girls started a friendship thatwould last a lifetime. Carrsaid of her friend’s childhood:“I was noisy and talkative,
but she was very quiet, andalways stayed out of trouble.
But whatever she did, shealways put herself completely
into it. But she was so quiet
you would never havebelieved she would get to thepoint of being arrested.”
Parks wanted to be ateacher, but had to dropout of school to care for her
ailing mother. (She later
received her high school
diploma.) When she was 18,
she fell in love with barber
Raymond Parks and they
later married. During partof the Second World War,
she worked at the raciallydesegregated Maxwell Field(now Maxwell Air Force
Base) in Montgomery.
She later attributed her
indignation toward thesegregated Montgomerytransportation system to thecontrast with the integrated
on-base transportation she
had experienced.
After the bus boycott
ended successfully in 1956,
Parks continued working
for civil rights. On several
occasions she joined King

Rosa Parks, age 84,
displays a program from thededication of the Rosa Parks
Elementary School in San
Francisco, California.

to support his efforts. The
following year, Parks moved
north, to Detroit, Michigan,
where she worked forCongressmen John Conyers,
who often joked that he had
more people visit his office tomeet his staff assistant thanto meet him.
Parks was inducted into
the National Women’s Hallof Fame in 1993. She waspresented the Medal of
Freedom Award by President
Bill Clinton in 1996 andthe Congressional Gold
Medal in 1999. The Southern
Christian Leadership Council
established an annual Rosa
Parks Freedom Award.
After her death on
October 24, 2005, Congressapproved a resolution
allowing her body to lie inhonor in the rotunda of the
U.S. Capitol. She was the 31st
person, the first woman, andonly the second black person
to be accorded that honor
since the practice began
in 1852.

Rosa Parks was always
modest about her role in thecivil rights movement, giving
credit to a higher power forher decision not to give up
her seat. “I was fortunate
God provided me with thestrength I needed at the
precise time conditions wereripe for change. I am thankful
to him every day that he gaveme the strength not to move.”

By Kenneth M. HareThe Editorial Page Director at
The Montgomery (Alabama)
Advertiser, Hare is also theauthor of They Walked to
Freedom 1955–1956: The
Story of the Montgomery Bus
Boycott.

FREE AT LAST: THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT 47

Civil Rights Workers:
Death in MississippiThe murders of civilrights workers James
Chaney, Andrew
Goodman, and Michael
Schwerner by a conspiracy ofpolice and Ku Klux Klansmen
in Mississippi on June 21,
1964, was one of the pivotal
events of the civil rights
movement. Because twoof the victims were white— and their disappearance
baffled investigators foralmost the entire summerof 1964 — the case becamea national preoccupation,bringing the Federal Bureau
of Investigation (FBI) andworld press attention to tiny
Philadelphia, Mississippi, thetown where the young men
had disappeared.
Mississippi was
historically a conservative
state where whites exercised
considerable control over the
majority black population;over the years, it had
developed a strong distrustfulattitude toward outsiders
or anyone who threatened“the southern way of life,”
meaning segregation and thedenial of many basic rights
to black people. As early as
1961, civil rights workers
had targeted Mississippi
for efforts to encourage
expanded voting rights, forin its repressive environment,
few blacks were allowed tovote. The voter registration
work was difficult, however,with volunteers frequently
being beaten and arrested.

Fearing that the rest of theUnited States did not fully
understand the importanceof these events, the civilrights movement hatched aplan to create the Mississippi
Summer Project, later known
as Freedom Summer, inwhich 1,000 northern college
students, mostly white,would flood the state tohelp with voter registration
and, by their presence, make
Mississippi’s situation better
known. At the prospectof such an “invasion,”
local resistance stiffened;belligerent state leaders
vowed opposition, and the Ku
Klux Klan, a white vigilantegroup that historically had
employed violence andintimidation to enforce
regional racial customs, wasrevived.
On the very first day ofFreedom Summer, June 21,
the three civil rights workers— Chaney, a local black
Mississippian who was 21;
Goodman, a 20-year old New
York college student; andSchwerner, a social worker
from New York’s Lower East
Side who at 24 was alreadya veteran activist — droveto the remote black hamletof Longdale to investigate arecent Klan assault. They had
visited previously in the hopeof opening a class to teachblacks how to register to vote.

48 FREE AT LAST: THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT

A 44-day FBI search in Mississippi discovered the bodies of the murderedcivil rights workers Andrew Goodman, James Early Chaney, and Michael
Henry Schwerner.

After meeting with theircontacts there and viewing
the charred remains of achurch the Klan had set onfire, the young men were
heading west toward thecounty seat of Philadelphia
when Deputy Sheriff Cecil
Ray Price stopped them for
speeding. He placed themunder arrest and escorted

them to the Neshoba County
jail. The civil rights workers,
while naturally suspiciousof the local police, did notresist. Like everyone in their
movement, they believed in
the power of nonviolence andnonconfrontation to attainthe goal of racial equality.

In 2005, 41 years after the deaths of Goodman, Chaney, and Schwerner,
Edgar Ray Killen was convicted of the murders.

They had no way of knowingthat Price was part of a Klan
conspiracy to hold themin jail until a mob could beassembled.
Later that night the deputy
released the three boys, who
immediately returned totheir car and began driving
toward Meridian, where
they were based, about ahalf hour’s drive south. Out
on the dark rural highway,
however, a Klan posse ofvehicles, including that of
Deputy Price, chased down
the civil rights workers.
Removing them to a secluded
area nearby, the Klansmen
pulled their victims from thecar, shot and killed them, andsecreted their bodies in an
earthen dam being built on aneighborhood dairy farm.

A 44-day search ensued,
as FBI agents dispatched byPresident Lyndon Johnson
scoured the state. All summer
long the world read reports ofthe mystery, while Mississippi
officials refused to even
investigate the case, insistingthat the disappearance ofthe men was likely a hoax.
When, on August 4, the FBI
finally located the dead civilrights workers, a national
outcry demanded that those
responsible for so heinous
a crime be caught andpunished.
In the U.S. justice system,
murders are normallyprosecuted under state law,in the courts of the state
where the crime took place.
When Mississippi declined
to press murder charges, thefederal government sought
alternatives. Beginning in the
1940s, Washington had tried
unsuccessfully to prosecutesouthern lynch mobs under

old Reconstruction-era civilrights laws. It had never doneso successfully, but the JusticeDepartment resolved to try
again. In early December
1964, the FBI arrested 21 menin the case — local Klansmen
and several police officers,among them the Neshoba
County sheriff and his deputy— and charged them withconspiracy to violate thethree activists’ civil rights.
Prosecutors were forced togo all the way to the U.S.
Supreme Court to have thelaws clarified and validated
for use in this case. But in
1967, in a landmark verdict, afederal jury of Mississippians
found seven of the defendants
guilty, and the federal court
handed down sentences of up
to 10 years.
The murders of Chaney,
Goodman, and Schwernerproved a tipping point inovercoming the dogged
resistance of “Fortress
Mississippi.” Whilesome civil rights workers
complained that it had taken
the deaths of white men
finally to bring national
scrutiny on Mississippi, thepowerful national reaction
helped topple the state’s
particularly vicious formsof racial discrimination
once and for all. Today,
black Mississippians votein large numbers, sit in thestate legislature, and haverepresented their state in the
U.S. Congress.

In the decades after 1964,
many Mississippians grewashamed of their state’s
conduct during the civilrights era, and there werecalls for the state to come toterms with its mishandling of
the affair. On June 21, 2005,
exactly 41 years to the day
since the three young men
had vanished, a Mississippi
state court convicted Edgar
Ray Killen, a Klan organizerof the conspiracy who had
long escaped accountability,of manslaughter. Americans
of all races and ethnicities
hailed the event as a symbolic
victory for justice and apartial resolution of a crimethat had long haunted thenation.

By Philip Dray
The author of Capitol
Men: The Epic Story ofReconstruction Throughthe Lives of the First Black
Congressmen, Dray is also
the co-author, with Seth
Cagin, of We Are Not Afraid:
The Story of Goodman,
Schwerner, and Chaney, andthe Civil Rights Campaign for
Mississippi.

FREE AT LAST: THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT 49

Medgar Evers:

Martyr of the Mississippi Movement

M

edgar Evers, headof the National
Association
for the Advancement ofColored People (NAACP) in
Mississippi, was a dynamic
leader whose life was cut
short by assassination in 1963.
His loss at age 37 was a tragic
reversal for the civil rights
movement, but it galvanizedfurther protest and drew
the sympathetic concern of
the federal government to
his cause.
Born in rural Mississippi
in 1925, Evers served with
U.S. armed forces in Europe
in the Second World War,returning home to attend
Alcorn College (a historically
black institution located near
Lorman, Mississippi), where
he was an accomplishedstudent and athlete. There he
met his future wife, Myrlie;
the couple was marriedin 1951.
Evers became a protégéof T.R.M. Howard, a black
physician and businessman
who founded both aninsurance agency anda medical clinic in theMississippi Delta. Howard
also established theMississippi Regional Councilof Negro Leadership, a civilrights organization that
employed a “top-down”
approach, encouraging
leading African-American
professionals and clergy topromote self-help, businessownership, and, ultimately,

Medgar Evers in 1963. He would be assassinated later that year.

the demand for civil rights
among the broader black
population.
Evers determined to see
the freedoms he had foughtfor overseas established athome. He soon emerged
as one of the Mississippi
Regional Council’s mosteffective activists. Like his
mentor, he mixed businesswith civil rights campaigning,
working as a salesman for
Howard’s Magnolia MutualLife Insurance Company
while organizing local
chapters of the NAACP
and leading boycotts of gas
stations that refused blacks
access to restrooms. (“Don’t
Buy Gas Where You Can’t
Use the Restroom” read one
bumper sticker.)

50 FREE AT LAST: THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT

In 1954, Evers challenged
the segregationist order byapplying for enrollment
at the law school of the
all-white University ofMississippi, known as “OleMiss.” Evers was turned away,
but his effort won him theadmiration of the NAACP’s
Legal Defense Fund, and he
was subsequently named
the organization’s first fieldsecretary in Mississippi,
a dangerous and lonely
assignment.
“It may sound funny, but
I love the South,” Evers once
said. “I don’t choose to live
anywhere else. There’s land
here where a man can raise
cattle, and I’m going to doit someday. There are lakes
where a man can sink a hookand fight a bass. There isroom here for my children toplay and grow and become
good citizens — if the white
man will let them.”
At the time, however,whites’ cooperation appearedvery much in doubt. Twoof the United States’ mostinfamous modern lynchings
occurred in Mississippi
in those years — the 1955
killing of 14-year-old
Emmett Till, and the 1959
lynching of Mack Charles
Parker in Poplarville. Evers
helped investigate the Till
murder, a case that received
extensive national attention.
Despite strong evidence ofthe defendants’ guilt, an allwhite male jury took only
67 minutes to acquit them.
One juror later asserted thatthe panel took a “soda break”
to stretch deliberations
beyond one hour, “to makeit look good.” (In May 2004,
the Justice Department,
calling the 1955 prosecution
a “grotesque miscarriage ofjustice,” reopened the murder
investigation. But with manypotential witnesses long deadand evidence scattered, agrand jury declined to indict
the last remaining living
suspect.)
Mississippi reacted harshly
to the Supreme Court’s 1954
Brown v. Board of Education
ruling and its order todesegregate the nation’s publicschools. Local white groups
known as Citizens Councils
vowed to resist integration

Myrlie Evers addresses a Howard University rally after the murder of her
husband, Medgar Evers. Myrlie Evers would emerge as a prominent civil rights
activist, and later would serve as chairperson of the NAACP.

at any cost. Evers, who had
earlier been denied admission
to Ole Miss, assisted otherblacks’ efforts to enroll there.
In 1962, Air Force veteranJames Meredith was admitted
to the school by a direct orderfrom U.S. Supreme Court
Justice Hugo Black. State
officials resisted the order,
and Meredith managed to
begin classes only after anight of rioting in which
two people were killed andhundreds injured.
As his efforts on
Meredith’s behalf intensified
the segregationist hatred ofEvers, he launched a series ofboycotts, sit-ins, and protests
in Jackson, Mississippi’s
largest city. Even the NAACP
was occasionally concernedwith the extent of Evers’s
efforts. When Martin LutherKing Jr. led a high-profile
civil rights campaign in
Birmingham, Alabama, in thespring of 1963, Evers steppedup his Jackson Movement— demanding the hiring ofblack police, the creation ofa biracial committee, thedesegregation of downtown
lunch counters, and theuse of courtesy titles (Mr.,
Mrs., Miss) by whites who
dealt with black shoppers in
downtown stores.
The city’s reaction was
ominous. Workmen erectedon the nearby Mississippi
State Fairgrounds a seriesof fenced stockades capableof holding thousands ofprotestors — a blunt message
to those who considered
protesting. Undeterred, Evers
and his supporters fought
on. Local blacks, including
many children, took part in
the subsequent rallies andstore boycotts, marching andjoining picket lines. Thesedemonstrations represented
a culmination of Evers’s longyears of civil rights work. A
high point came when Evers
appeared on local television
to explain the movement’s
objectives. Whites were notaccustomed to seeing black
people on TV, especiallypresenting their case in theirown words, and many wereoutraged.

Soon, attempts were madeon Evers’s life: A bomb wasthrown into his carport, avehicle nearly ran him over.
As Evers returned home on
the night of June 12, 1963, he
was ambushed and shot as hegot out of his car. He died at
his own front door.
The murder of so populara leader enraged the black
community. Over several
days there were numerous
confrontations with police indowntown Jackson. Even thewhites who ran the city wereshocked by Evers’s death, foralthough he was an agitator,
he was at least a familiar
presence. The city fathers
made the unusual concessionof allowing a silent march
to honor him, as civil rights
leaders from across the nation
arrived to pay tribute. He wasburied at Arlington National
Cemetery in Washington,
D.C., with full military
honors. Medgar’s brotherCharles assumed some ofhis duties with the Jackson
campaign, and his widow,
Myrlie, became a well-known
activist and would serve as
chairperson of the NAACP
from 1995 to 1998.
It was Medgar Evers’s fateto have his name linked with
one of the most frustrating
legal cases of the civil rights
era. His killer, a white
supremacist named Byron
De La Beckwith, scion ofan old Mississippi family,
was put on trial twice in the
1960s, but in each instance

was acquitted by white juries.
Not until 1994, a full three
decades after Evers had led
his fellow Mississippians in a
crusade against bigotry andintolerance, was Beckwith
convicted and sentenced tolife in prison, where he diedin 2001.
Ultimately, Evers
triumphed, even in death. The
year he was murdered, only
28,000 black Mississippians
had successfully registered
to vote. By 1971, that number
had risen to over a quartermillion and, by 1982, to half amillion. By 2006, Mississippi
had the highest number ofblack elected officials in the
country, including a quarterof its delegation in the U.S.
House of Representatives andsome 27 percent of its statelegislature.

By Philip Dray
The author of Capitol
Men: The Epic Story ofReconstruction Throughthe Lives of the First Black
Congressmen, Dray is also
the co-author, with Seth
Cagin, of We Are Not Afraid:
The Story of Goodman,
Schwerner, and Chaney, andthe Civil Rights Campaign for
Mississippi.

FREE AT LAST: THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT 51

—6 —“It Cannot Continue”
Establishing Legal EqualityT

he civil rights movement led by Martin
Luther King Jr. and others was theindispensable catalyst for the passage of
two new laws of unparalleled importance.
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights
Act of 1965 at last would establish firmly the legal
equality of African Americans. They were enacted
partly because of a structural transformation ofAmerican politics, including the unexpected elevationof a powerful, pro-civil-rights southern president who
helped overcome the forces that had defeated earlier
civil rights legislation. Above all, support for theselaws came from the growing political constituency forchange — the millions of Americans horrified by theactions of segregationists in the South.

Changing Politics
Ever since post-Civil War Reconstruction failed to ensure
the civil rights of blacks in the American South, two great
obstacles had blocked efforts at the national level to end
52 FREE AT LAST: THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT

Top to bottom: The Rev. Hosea Williams addresses a 1965 Selma, Alabama
voter registration rally.
1966: With the Voting Rights Act now law, Alabama African Americans queue
up to register as voters.

Jim Crow: the political party system and the rules of the
U.S. Congress. When the United States acquired vast andpotentially slaveholding territories (including California
and much of today’s American Southwest) in the Mexican
War of 1846-1848, the nation’s political parties increasingly
formulated their positions on sectional lines: Democrats
favored the South, and the expansion of slavery; Whigs, andlater Republicans, favored the North, opposed the extension ofslavery into the newly acquired territories, and often believedthat complete abolition was only a matter of time. Whigs andRepublicans in this era favored the aggressive use of federal
power to promote economic development. Southerners
and Democrats — fearing federal action against slavery —favored the supremacy of individual states against a federal
government properly limited to only those powers specificallygranted by the Constitution. This “states’ rights” concept has
deep roots in American history. Early in the 19th century,
however, it became entangled with the issues of slavery,
segregation, and civil rights.
These patterns persisted after the Civil War. As wehave seen, the post-war Radical Republicans pressed fora Reconstruction that would ensure African-American
rights. After Reconstruction, the “Party of Lincoln” — theRepublicans — continued to enjoy the support of most blacks.
The Democratic Party, meanwhile, evolved into an allianceof southern segregationists and northern urban residents,
often immigrants and industrial workers. As the 20th century
progressed, the party’s northern wing became more politicallyliberal, and, with President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal
economic policies, more accepting of broad federal powers.
Liberal northern Democrats often chafed against southernracism, but their party could not compete nationally without
the support of the “solid South.”
The rules of the U.S. Senate were another formidable
obstacle to civil rights legislation. While passing a billrequired only a simple majority, any senator could blocka vote simply by declining to stop speaking during Senate
debate, refusing to relinquish the floor. At that time, a twothirds majority of senators could vote “cloture” of debate. In
practical terms, then, no significant legislation could pass the
Senate without the support of two-thirds of its members. This
meant that southern senators, elected in states where blacks
were routinely deprived of the right to vote, could — and did— block civil rights bills.
Anti-civil-rights filibusters, as these lengthy senatorial
speeches came to be known, blocked much legislation over
the years. In 1946, a weeks-long ﬁlibuster defeated a billthat enjoyed majority support and would have prevented
workplace discrimination. In 1957, Senator Strom Thurmond(then a Democratic senator from South Carolina) ﬁlibusteredfor 24 hours and 18 minutes in an unsuccessful effort to block
the mild Civil Rights Act of 1957.
But slowly the constellation of political forces was shiftingin ways that would prove helpful to the civil rights movement.
The black vote, at least in the North, had grown more
important. For most of the nation’s history, the overwhelming
majority of African Americans resided in the South. During
the first half of the 20th century, many African Americans
began to move from the South to Chicago and other northerncities. An estimated 6 million blacks would head north during
this “Great Migration.” The North was not free of racial
prejudice, but blacks there could vote, and they became anincreasingly attractive target for ambitious politicians.
In 1960, the Democratic candidate for president, SenatorJohn F. Kennedy, was determined to increase his share of thehistorically Republican African-American vote. When Martin
Luther King Jr. was jailed following an Atlanta sit-in, Kennedy
phoned King’s wife, Coretta Scott King, to offer his sympathy,
even as his brother, the future attorney general, Robert F.
Kennedy, worked to secure King’s release. Freed on bail, Kingacknowledged a “great debt of gratitude to Senator Kennedy
and his family.” Kennedy carried an estimated 70 percent of
the African-American vote in a tight election in which heprevailed over Republican Vice President Richard M. Nixon
by less than 1 percent of the popular vote.
While historians differ over the Kennedy administration’s
civil rights record, it is not unfair to remark that it was better
than that of its 20th-century predecessors, but not as strong ascivil rights activists would have liked. John and Robert Kennedy
repeatedly urged King not to press too hard. But when King
would forge ahead, the Kennedys generally would follow.
As previously described, President Kennedy introduced
broad civil rights legislation in the aftermath of the eventsin Birmingham. With Kennedy’s assassination in November
1963, responsibility for that legislation would fall to his vicepresident and successor, Lyndon Johnson.

Lyndon Baines Johnson
The new president possessed two enormous assets: asingularly powerful personality and a mastery of theprocedures and personalities of the U.S. Congress perhaps
unparalleled in American history. From 1954 to 1960, Johnson
had served, in the words of biographer Robert Dallek, as“the most effective majority leader in Senate history.” To his
command of the Senate’s often arcane rules and traditions,
Johnson added what one might call intense powers of
personal persuasion. “He’d come on just like a tidal wave,”said Johnson’s vice president, Hubert Humphrey. “He went
through walls. … He’d take the whole room over.”The historian Doris Kearns Goodwin, who served as aWhite House fellow under Johnson, recalled Johnson’s ability
FREE AT LAST: THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT 53

to focus all his energies on extracting a needed vote froma recalcitrant senator. She called it “The Treatment.” King
biographer Marshall Frady described it as… a ferocious manner of persuasion that proceeded bya kind of progressive physical engulfment: wrapping one
giant arm around a colleague’s shoulder with his other
hand clenching his lapel, then straightening the senator’s tie
knot, then nudging and punching his chest and sticking aforefinger into his shirt. Johnson would lower his face closer
and closer to his subject’s in escalating exhortation until theman would be bowed backward like a parenthesis mark.
Johnson had been born poor in Texas and understood
intimately the conditions under which African Americans
and Mexican Americans labored. As a congressman andthen senator from a southern state, electoral realities obliged
Johnson to mute some of his progressive views on civilrights and racial equality. But elevated unexpectedly to thepresidency, Johnson placed the full measure of his politicalskills to work for the passage of the landmark civil rights laws.
As the new president told Richard Russell, an influential
senator from Georgia whose opposition to civil rights
legislation posed a formidable obstacle: “I’m not going to cavil
and I’m not going to compromise. I’m going to pass it just as itis, Dick, and if you get in my way I’m going to run you down. I
just want you to know that because I care about you.”

The Civil Rights Act of 1964
For nearly a century, many states had managed to escape theobvious mandate of the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S.
Constitution:
No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge
the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States;
nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or
property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person
within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.
Court decisions such as Brown v. Board of Educationand the many others won by Thurgood Marshall and the
National Association for the Advancement of Colored People
finally established that government, even state governmentsin the Deep South, could not discriminate against African
Americans or anyone else. Civil rights activists like theFreedom Riders risked their lives, but at least there was no
doubt that the law was on their side and that those who
attacked them were lawbreakers.
But the owners of a movie theater or a department store
lunch counter were not the government. As a result, the civilrights movement was obliged to wage battles one city andone business at a time. While Rosa Parks’s brave refusal to
move to the back of the bus led to the desegregation of public
54 FREE AT LAST: THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT

transportation in Montgomery, Alabama, hundreds or eventhousands more Rosa Parks — and Martin Luther Kings— would be needed to desegregate fully the South.
Plainly, legislation was needed to prohibit acts of private
discrimination in public places. Such a law would represent
a dramatic expansion of federal authority. The American
Constitution explains what the federal — and, in the postCivil War amendments the state governments — may andmay not do. It does not speak of Woolworth’s lunch counter.
In the end, proponents of what became the Civil Rights
Act of 1964 would assert, and the courts subsequently
would accept, that Congress possessed the authority to ban
discrimination in employment, public accommodations,and other aspects of life. They pointed to the constitutional
provision (Article I, Section 8) authorizing Congress “toregulate Commerce … among the several States.” By the mid20th century, nearly every economic transaction involved someform of interstate commerce, were one to look closely enough.
In 1969, for instance, the Supreme Court, in Daniel v. Paul,
rejected a discriminatory “entertainment club’s” claim that its
lack of interstate activity exempted it from the Civil Rights Act.
Among the Court’s findings: The snack bar served hamburgers
and hot dogs on rolls, and the “principal ingredients going into
the bread were produced and processed in other States.”
President Johnson’s introduction of the Civil Rights Act
of 1964 provoked one of the nation’s great political contests.
The act prevailed because much of the nation had looked hard
into Bull Connor’s eyes and had not liked what it saw. But
passage also would require all of Johnson’s formidable skills. It
was understood that majorities of Republicans and northern
Democrats would support the bill, but that Johnson would
have to engineer a two-thirds Senate majority to overcome theinevitable ﬁlibuster by southern Democrats.
Johnson, in his first State of the Union Address on
January 8, 1964, urged Congress to “let this session … beknown as the session which did more for civil rights than thelast hundred sessions combined.” The months that followed
saw intense congressional fact-finding and debate over theact. The House of Representatives held more than 70 days of
public hearings, during which some 275 witnesses offerednearly 6,000 pages of testimony. At the end of this process, theHouse passed the bill by a vote of 290 to 130.
The Senate filibuster would last for 57 days, during whichtime the Senate conducted virtually no other business. As
the speeches continued (one senator carried a 1,500-page
speech onto the floor), President Johnson subjected many asenator to “The Treatment,” and a variety of labor, religious,and civil rights groups lobbied for cloture and a final vote.
Finally, on June 10, 1964, the Senate voted 71 to 29 to end
debate — the first time cloture had ever been successfully
invoked in a civil rights matter. A week later, the Senate passed

its version of the civil rights bill. On July 2, 1964, the Houseof Representatives agreed to the Senate version, sending thebill to the White House.
President Johnson affixed his signature that evening,in the course of a nationally televised address. “Americans
of every race and color have died in battle to protect our
freedom,” he told the nation. He continued,
Americans of every race and color have worked to build anation of widening opportunities. Now our generation ofAmericans has been called on to continue the unending
search for justice within our own borders.
We believe that all men are created equal. Yet many are
denied equal treatment.
We believe that all men have certain unalienable rights. Yet
many Americans do not enjoy those rights.
We believe that all men are entitled to the blessings ofliberty. Yet millions are being deprived of those blessings— not because of their own failures, but because of the colorof their skin.
The reasons are deeply imbedded in history and tradition
and the nature of man. We can understand — without
rancor or hatred — how this all happened.

“It cannot continue … .” President Lyndon B. Johnson signs into law the Civil
Rights Act of 1964, in the presence of congressional leaders, and Attorney
General Robert F. Kennedy (at rear, directly behind Johnson).

But it cannot continue. Our Constitution, the foundation of
our Republic, forbids it. … The purpose of the law is simple.
It does not restrict the freedom of any American, so long as
he respects the rights of others.
It does not give special treatment to any citizen.
It does say the only limit to a man’s hope for happiness, andfor the future of his children, shall be his own ability.
It does say that there are those who are equal before
God shall now also be equal in the polling booths, in theclassrooms, in the factories …
My fellow citizens, we have come now to a time of testing.
We must not fail.
Let us close the springs of racial poison. Let us pray forwise and understanding hearts. Let us lay aside irrelevant
differences and make our nation whole. Let us hasten thatday when our unmeasured strength and our unboundedspirit will be free.

FREE AT LAST: THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT 55

Clockwise from above: “We shall overcome.” A newly
registered voter in Selma, Alabama, August 1965.
Civil rights marchers approach Montgomery, Alabama,on the fourth day of the Selma-to-Montgomery march.
Americans from across the nation joined in the effort. The
four protestors at front hailed from (left to right) New York(first two), Michigan, and Selma, Alabama.
March 1965: A federal marshal reads a court orderenjoining a planned voter registration protest march at
Selma, Alabama. Dr. King is at right, Andrew Young, a future
Ambassador to the United Nations and mayor of Atlanta,
Georgia, is at left with arms folded.

The Act’s Powers
After two centuries of slavery, segregation, and legal
inequality, and the resulting economic disadvantage, the Civil
Rights Act of 1964 gave the federal government and private
individuals the legal authority they needed to attack squarely
racial (and gender — the act also bars discrimination on thebasis of sex) discrimination.
This authority is spelled out in broad provisions, called“titles.” The major points include:•T itle I, which abolished unequal application of voter
registration requirements.
•T itle II, which prohibited discrimination in public
accommodations. The title authorized individuals to filelawsuits to obtain injunctive relief (a court order orderingsomeone to do or not to do something) and allowed theattorney general of the United States to intervene in thoselawsuits he deemed “of general public importance.”• Title III, which authorized the U.S. attorney general tofile a lawsuit, provided the case would “materially further
the orderly progress of desegregation in public facilities,”
where an aggrieved person was unable himself or herself tomaintain such a suit.
56 FREE AT LAST: THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT• Title IV, which authorized the attorney general to file suit
to force the desegregation of public schools. This provision
aimed to accelerate the slow progress made during thedecade since Brown v. Board of Education.
• Title VI, which extended the act’s provisions to “anyprogram or activity receiving federal financial assistance.” It
authorized the federal government to withhold federal funds
from any such program that practiced discrimination.
• Title VII, which prohibited employment discrimination by
any business employing more than 25 people. It establishedthe Equal Employment Opportunity Commission toreview complaints of discrimination in recruitment, hiring,compensation, and advancement.

The Voting Rights Act of 1965: The Background
Court decisions and civil rights statutes were crucial tools
in establishing, protecting, and enforcing the civil rights
of African Americans. The surest way to guarantee thepermanence of these rights, however, was to empower blacks
politically to assert themselves as full participants in the
democratic system. The right to vote, then, was arguably
the most fundamental right of all, and one that, practicallyspeaking, African Americans in the South had not enjoyedsince the failure of Reconstruction.
Looking back, after the withdrawal of northern armies
from the South in 1877, white southern elites re-imposed theirpolitical dominance. Suppressing the African-American vote
was crucial to this objective and was achieved by a numberof methods. At first, raw violence was the preferred tool. A
number of other practices developed.
One such practice was the “poll tax.” This was a special
tax levied equally on every member of a community. Citizens
who failed to pay were deemed ineligible to vote. Many
southern states introduced poll taxes between 1889 and 1910.
Given the extent of African-American poverty, the poll tax
disenfranchised large numbers of black voters, and poor
whites as well. The Twenty-Fourth Amendment to the U.S.
Constitution (1964) prohibited denying any citizen the rightto vote in an election for federal office for failure to pay a poll
tax. A Supreme Court decision two years later extended thisprohibition to state and local elections.
Another practice was the “literacy requirement” for voter
registration. Highly subjective oral and written examinations
nearly always were applied with special vigor to AfricanAmerican applicants. Some states would not even permit anapplicant to take the examination unless an already-registeredvoter would vouch for him or her. It was nearly impossible formany black applicants even to take the test, since there werevery few African Americans on the southern voting rolls,
and few southern whites would risk social ostracism or worse
to vouch-in a prospective black voter. The examination wasoften blatantly unfair. It might require an applicant to writeout a passage from the Constitution as dictated by the county
registrar — dictated clearly to white applicants, mumbled
to blacks.
Southern election officials adopted any number of tactics
to prevent black applicants from qualifying. In Alabama, forinstance, the decision whether an applicant passed or failed
was made in secret, and there was no method for challenging
the decisions. Not surprisingly, at least one Alabama board ofregistrars “qualified” each and every white applicant and not asingle black.
Whatever tactic was employed, the threat of violencealways lurked in the background. Election officials mightpublish in local newspapers the names of black voter
applicants. This alerted local white Citizens Councils andKu Klux Klan chapters to blacks who might need to be“persuaded” to withdraw their applications.
Against this background of violent intimidation, activists
from the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee andthe Congress of Racial Equality, among others, launched voter
registration campaigns in rural and heavily black parts of the
Deep South in 1961. The work took incredible courage. Asan early volunteer, the plantation worker Fannie Lou Hamer,
memorably explained: “I guess if I’d had any sense, I’d havebeen scared — but what was the point of being scared? The
only thing they [white people] could do was kill me, and it
seemed they’d been trying to do that a little at a time since I
could remember.”
In 1964, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference,
the Congress of Racial Equality, the National Association
for the Advancement of Colored People, and the Student
Nonviolent Coordinating Committee launched the “Freedom
Summer.” More than 1,000 northern whites, mostly college
students, volunteered to travel to Mississippi and help black
voters register. Their presence also was intended to draw
national attention to the violent suppression of black
voting rights.
On June 21, the very first day of Freedom Summer, thevolunteers achieved this goal in a tragic manner. Three civilrights workers, African American James Chaney and two
white Jewish Americans, Michael Schwerner and Andrew
Goodman, were reported missing and later found murdered.
Their murder forced Americans to confront more directly the
related issues of voting rights and violence. While the bravevolunteers persuaded some 17,000 equally brave African
Americans to complete voter registration applications,election officials ultimately accepted less than 10 percentof these. Blacks, more and more Americans understood,
comprised nearly half of Mississippi’s population but only 5
percent of its registered voters.

Bloody Sunday in Selma
The following year, civil rights organizations launched aregistration drive in Selma, Alabama, a small city about 50
miles west of Montgomery. There were about 15,000 blacks
residing in Selma, but only 350 had successfully registered tovote. At a February 1965 voting rights rally in nearby Marion,
police shot and killed a young black man named Jimmie Lee
Jackson.
In response, activists called a March 7 march from Selma
to the Alabama state capitol at Montgomery. Led by John
Lewis of SNCC and Martin Luther King’s aide, the Reverend
Hosea Williams, some 525 marchers were met on the Pettus
Bridge over the Alabama River by Alabama state troopers andlocal lawmen. They had gas masks at hand and nightsticks
at the ready. The trooper leader (Major John Cloud) ordered
the marchers to return to their church. Reverend Williams
answered: “May we have a word with the major?” “There is noword to be had,” came the reply.
The suppression of the march, the New York Times
reported, “was swift and thorough.” The paper described aflying wedge of troopers and recounted how “the first 10 or
20 Negroes were swept to the ground screaming, arms and
FREE AT LAST: THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT 57

“Bloody Sunday,” Selma, Alabama, March 7, 1965. The suppression of thefirst Selma-to-Montgomery civil rights march was swift and thorough.
“I thought I saw death,” said future U.S. Representative John Lewis.

legs flying.” With the news media on hand and recording
their actions for a horrified national audience, the troopers
fired tear gas canisters. Local law enforcement pursued theretreating protestors with whips and nightsticks. “I was hit in
the head by a state trooper with a nightstick ... I thought I saw
death,” said Lewis, hospitalized with a concussion.
For millions of Americans, March 7, 1965, would beknown simply as Bloody Sunday. Typical was the reaction of
U.S. Representative James G. O’Hara of Michigan, who called
the day’s events “a savage action, storm-trooper style, under
direction of a reckless demagogue [a reference to Alabama’s
governor, George Wallace].”
From Atlanta, Martin Luther King Jr. announced that
he and Ralph Abernathy would lead a second Selma-toMontgomery march that Tuesday. He called on “religious
leaders from all over the nation to join us on Tuesday in ourpeaceful, nonviolent march for freedom.” Before the march
could occur, a federal judge, not unfriendly to the activists
but determined to hold hearings before acting, issued a court
order temporarily forbidding the march.
King was under intense political pressure from every
corner. Federal officials urged him to delay the march. With
the judge’s injunction now in place, King and his followers
would be the lawbreakers should the march proceed. But
58 FREE AT LAST: THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT

Marchers cross the Edmund Pettis bridge over the Alabama River, March 21,
1965, the beginning of the third Selma-to-Montgomery march.

younger activists, many affiliated with SNCC, wanted tomove faster. King risked losing his place at the head of the
movement were he unable to satisfy their demands.
On March 9, King and Abernathy led some 3,000
peaceful protestors — their black followers joined byhundreds of white religious leaders — on the second
Selma-to-Montgomery march. Troopers again met themat the Pettus Bridge. The marchers stopped, then sang the
movement’s anthem: “We Shall Overcome.” The group thenprayed, and Abernathy thanked God for the marchers who“came to present their bodies as a living sacrifice.” King thendirected his followers to turn back. “As a nonviolent, I couldn’t
move people into a potentially violent situation,” he told the
Washington Post.
King’s decision disappointed some of the more zealous
activists. But King had been conferring quietly with federal
officials. The events of Bloody Sunday also had exerted greatpressure on an already sympathetic President Johnson.
Too many Americans at long last had seen enough. Fromreligious groups and state legislatures, youthful protestors
and members of Congress, the demand for federal action was
growing. The two leaders appear to have struck a tacit bargain:
King would not violate the injunction, and the Johnson
administration quietly suggested it would soon be lifted.
On March 15, Johnson introduced the legislation thatwould become the Voting Rights Act. Addressing the nationthat night, President Johnson employed the plainest oflanguage in the service of a basic American value — the rightto vote:There is no Negro problem. There is no southern problem.
There is no northern problem. There is only an American
problem.
And we are met here tonight as Americans … to solve thatproblem.
The Constitution says that no person shall be kept fromvoting because of his race or his color. We have all sworn anoath before God to support and to defend that Constitution.
We must now act in obedience to that oath. …
There is no constitutional issue here. The command of theConstitution is plain. There is no moral issue. It is wrong— deadly wrong — to deny any of your fellow Americans
the right to vote in this country. There is no issue of Statesrights or National rights. There is only the struggle forhuman rights. …
What happened in Selma is part of a far larger movement
which reaches into every section and State of America. It is
the effort of American Negroes to secure for themselves thefull blessings of American life.

“We have come from three centuries of suffering and hardship.” The marchers
arrive at Montgomery.

Their cause must be our cause too, because it is not justNegroes but really it is all of us who must overcome thecrippling legacy of bigotry and injustice. And we shallovercome.
Two days later, the federal court lifted the injunction
against the marchers. U.S. District Judge Frank M. Johnson
Jr. further ordered that state and county authorities notinterfere and indeed take affirmative measures to protect theactivists. “The law is clear,” the judge wrote, “that the right topetition one’s government for the redress of grievances may be
exercised in large groups … and these rights may be exercisedby marching, even along public highways.”

The Selma-to-Montgomery March
By March 21, thousands of Americans from all walks oflife began to assemble in Selma for the third Selma-toMontgomery march. The marchers planned to cover theentire 87-kilometer route over the course of five days and fournights, with marchers sleeping under the stars. The route they
followed is today a National Historic Trail.
FREE AT LAST: THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT 59

With the support of the Johnson administration andan aroused American people, the difference from the earlier
efforts could not be more apparent. Major John Cloud of
the Alabama State Troopers had ordered the beatings andgassings two weeks earlier. Now he was obliged to occupy
the lead car accompanying the protestors across the Pettus
Bridge. Federal military police were on hand to provide
protection, and elements of the Alabama National Guard were
temporarily placed under federal command. As more than
3,000 marchers began the first leg of their quest, Abernathy
told them, “When we get to Montgomery, we are going to go
up to Governor Wallace’s door and say, ‘George, it’s all overnow. We’ve got the ballot.’ ”“Walk together, children,” King instructed, “and don’t you
get weary, and it will lead us to a Promised Land.”The New York Times offered this description of the crowd
as it set out along U.S. Highway 80:
There were civil rights leaders and rabbis, pretty coeds andbearded representatives of the student left, movie stars andinfants in strollers. There were two blind people and a manwith one leg. But mostly there were the Negroes who believe
they have been denied the vote too long.

The marchers covered a bit over 11 kilometers that firstday, then pitched two large circus tents and slept in sleeping
bags and blankets. The next morning King announced: “I amhappy to say that I have slept in a sleeping bag for the first timein my life. I feel fine.” By the second day, though, blisters andsunburn were common.
Because the highway narrowed in rural areas, the federal
court had ruled that only 300 marchers could participate
until the road widened again outside Montgomery. But a fairnumber of “extras” chose to tag along, even during the thirdday, which was marked by torrential rains. The marchers
responded in song; among their selections: “Ain’t Gonna Let
Nobody Turn Me ‘Round” and “We Shall Overcome.”
King briefly left the march to deliver a long-scheduledaddress in Cleveland, Ohio. There King made explicit his
debt to Mahatma Gandhi, whose famous march to thesea anticipated the Selma-to-Montgomery trek. “We arechallenged to make the world one in terms of brotherhood,”
King said. “We must learn to live together as brothers, or wewill all perish as fools.”
As the marchers approached Montgomery, the crowd
swelled to 25,000 or more. They came by chartered plane, bybus, and by rail. A delegation of leading American historians
arrived to participate in the final leg. They issued a statement:“We believe it is high time for the issues over which the Civil
War was fought to be finally resolved.” The singer and civilrights activist Harry Belafonte enlisted an all-star group of
Hollywood entertainers.
On March 25, with Martin Luther King at the head,
the activists entered Montgomery. They marched up Dexter
Avenue, tracing the path traversed a century ago by theinaugural parade of Jefferson Davis, first and only presidentof the Confederate States of America, the would-be nation
whose championing of slavery sparked the Civil War. Now, acentury later, the descendants of black slaves approached thestate house to demand the rights to which they had long been
entitled, and long been denied. Their petition read:
We have come not only five days and 50 miles [80kilometers], but we have come from three centuries ofsuffering and hardship. We have come to you, the Governorof Alabama, to declare that we must have our freedom
NOW. We must have the right to vote; we must have equal
protection of the law, and an end to police brutality.

“How long? Not long. Because no lie can live forever,” said Martin LutherKing, Jr. at the end of the Selma-to-Montgomery march. Pictured here: Kingdelivering a sermon at his Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, Georgia.

60 FREE AT LAST: THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT

Governor Wallace had already fled the scene. It didn’t
matter.
King delivered that day one of his most famous speeches,
one in which he quoted a 70-year-old participant in theMontgomery bus boycott. Asked one day whether she would
not have preferred riding to walking, Mother Pollard replied:“My feets is tired, but my soul is rested.”

The just concluded march, King said, was “a shining
moment in the conscience of man.” He singled out ashonorable and inspiring “the pilgrimage of clergymen
and laymen of every race and faith pouring into Selma toface danger at the side of its embattled Negroes.” “Like anidea whose time has come,” King continued, “not even themarching of mighty armies can halt us. We are moving to theland of freedom.”
We must come to see that the end we seek is a society atpeace with itself, a society that can live with its conscience.
That will be a day not of the white man, not of the blackman. That will be the day of man as man.
I know you are asking today, “How long will it take?” I cometo say to you this afternoon however difficult the moment,
however frustrating the hour, it will not be long, because
truth pressed to earth will rise again.
How long? Not long, because no lie can live forever.
How long? Not long, because you still reap what you sow.
How long? Not long. Because the arm of the moral universe
is long but it bends toward justice.

The Voting Rights Act Enacted
Five months later, the Congress passed and President Johnson
signed into law the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Shortly before
noon on August 6, 1965, Johnson drove to the U.S. Capitol
building. Waiting for him were the leaders of Congress andof the civil rights movement, Martin Luther King Jr. and John
Lewis among them. In signing the act into law, Johnson told
the nation:
The central fact of American civilization ... is that freedom
and justice and the dignity of man are not just words to us.
We believe in them. Under all the growth, and the tumult,and abundance, we believe. And so, as long as some amongus are oppressed and we are part of that oppression, it must
blunt our faith and sap the strength of our high purpose.
Thus this is a victory for the freedom of the American
Negro, but it is also a victory for the freedom of theAmerican nation. And every family across this great
entire searching land will live stronger in liberty, will live
more splendid in expectation, and will be prouder to be
American because of the act that you have passed that I
will sign today.

What the Act DoesThe Fifteenth Amendment already barred racial
discrimination in voting rights, so the problem was not that
African Americans lacked the legal right to vote. It was thatsome state and local officials had systematically deprived
blacks of those rights. The Voting Rights Act accordingly
authorized the federal government to assume control ofthe voter registration process in any state or voting district
that had in 1964 employed a literacy or other qualifying test
and in which fewer than half of voting age residents had
either registered or voted. Six entire southern states werethus “covered,” as were a number of counties in several otherstates. Covered jurisdictions were prohibited from modifying
their voting rules and regulations without first affording
federal officials the opportunity to review the change fordiscriminatory intent or effect. Other provisions barred thefuture use of literacy tests and directed the attorney general of
the United States to commence legal action to end the use ofpoll taxes in state elections. (The Twenty-Fourth Amendment
to the U.S. Constitution, ratified in January 1964, alreadybarred the poll tax in elections for federal office.)
The introduction of federal “examiners” ended the massintimidation of potential minority voters. The results weredramatic. By the end of 1965, the five states of the Deep Southalone registered 160,000 new African-American voters. By
2000, African-American registration rates trailed that ofwhites by only 2 percent. In the South, where in 1965 only two
African Americans served either in the U.S. Congress or astate legislature, the number today is 160.
The Voting Rights Act was originally enacted for a fiveyear period, but it has been both extended and expanded to
introduce new requirements, such as the provision of bilingual
election materials.
In 1982, President Ronald Reagan signed a 25-year
extension: “The right to vote is the crown jewel of American
liberties,” he said, “and we will not see its luster diminished.”
President George W. Bush signed another 25-year extension
in 2006.

FREE AT LAST: THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT 61

White Southerners’ Reactions to
the Civil Rights MovementAfrican Americans
who waged epic
struggles for civilrights also altered whiteSoutherners’ worlds. Some
whites embraced theprospect of a new interracialland. Many more reactedwith hostility. They fearedsocial and political change,and grappled uncomfortably
with the fact that their way oflife seemed gone for good.
The “Southern way of life”
encompassed a distinctive
mix of economic, social,and cultural practices —symbolized by the fragrantmagnolia, the slow paceof life, and the sweet mint
julep, a popular alcoholic
beverage. It also contained
implications about theregion’s racial order — one inwhich whites wielded powerand blacks accommodated.
Centuries of slavery anddecades of segregation
cemented a legal and politicalsystem characterized bywhite dominance. By the20th century, “Jim Crow”
had become a shorthand forlegalized segregation. (Thatphrase derived from thename of a character in a 19th
century minstrel show inwhich whites wore blackface
makeup and caricatured slave
culture.) Massive inequalities
marked every facet of daily
life. Blacks always addressedwhites as “Mr.” or “Mrs.,”
though whites seldom
bestowed such courtesy titles

on African Americans. Blacks
labored in white homes as
nannies, cooks, maids, andyardmen. Whites expecteddocility; black resistanceseemed unfathomable.
Through the long years ofslavery and segregation, whiteSoutherners produced andabsorbed cruel stereotypes
about African Americans:that they were unclean andshiftless, unintelligent andoversexed. Blacks became
either clowns or savages, withno area in between. Whites
often defined themselves —their status, identities, daily
lives, and self-worth — inrelation to these concocted
notions about African
Americans. If blacks were
submissive and infantile,whites were strong anddignified. Blackness meantdegradation; to be free wasto be white. The civil rights
struggle threatened to hoist
African Americans up andout of this social “place” thatwhites had created for them.
White Southerners wouldfind blacks in their schools
and neighborhoods, theirrestaurants, and pollingplaces. Many whites feared
this vision of the Southern
future.
Many white Southerners
came to believe that African
Americans abided — andeven enjoyed — their roles as
second-class citizens. Whenthe civil rights movement
tore through the South in the
1950s and 1960s, it exposed

62 FREE AT LAST: THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT

Demonstrators protesting the integration of a New Orleans, Louisiana, public
elementary school, 1960.

the falsity of such beliefs. At
long last, African Americans
voiced their discontent anddemanded dignity. Black
rebellion clashed so sharply
with white perceptions thatmany disbelieved their own
eyes. And as grassroots
organizers led a mass
movement for black equality,
whites rose up in resistance.
The U.S. Supreme Court,with its 1954 decision in
Brown v. Board of Education,
ensured that Southernschools would become thefirst battlegrounds. The court
ruled that segregated schools
stamped black children witha “badge of inferiority,” andthat Southern states must
integrate their schools “withall deliberate speed.”Southern politicians
denounced the court ruling.
In language that played upon
whites’ underlying racial
fears and stoked contempt
for the federal government,
senators such as Harry Byrdof Virginia claimed thecourt had overstepped its
bounds. White Southerners
tried to circumvent theorder, and rallied to beatback desegregation at every
turn. Local leaders andbusinessmen organized
themselves into Citizens
Councils, groups that visited
economic reprisal upon any
blacks — or whites — who
dared advocate integration.

In 1957, a federal court
ordered integration of the
Little Rock, Arkansas, publicschools. Nine blacks wereselected to enroll in Little
Rock’s Central High School,
but Governor Orval Faubus
blocked the students fromthe schoolhouse door. Afterinitial reluctance, President
Dwight Eisenhower mobilized
a battle group of the U.S.
Army’s 101st Airborne
Division to enforce the court
order by escorting the “Little
Rock Nine” to class. Whenseveral African-American
teenagers finally arrived at
Central, they encountered a
vicious white mob. Parents
jeered the incoming students
and the federal marshals who
protected them. Enraged
white Southerners deplored ascene they thought had diedwith Reconstruction: thatof federal troops protecting
blacks’ civil rights in theSouth.
A similar conflagration
erupted in New Orleans
when that city became thefirst in the Deep South todesegregate. In November
1960, four African-American
girls integrated Frantz
Elementary School in thecity’s Ninth Ward. Thatneighborhood was one of thecity’s poorest. In addition togrievances against organizedblacks and an active
federal government, whiteSoutherners also felt deepclass divides. White Ninth
Ward residents believed thatthe city’s rich and powerful
had foisted integration

Often hooded, members of the Ku Klux Klan advocated white supremacy andemployed terrorism, violence, and lynching against African Americans, Jews,
and Roman Catholics, among others.

upon them — and themalone. Across the region,
poor whites shouldered the“burden” of integration. If
the upper classes maintainedsocial safety valves likecountry clubs, private schools,
and exclusive suburbs,
poorer whites confronted
the fact that their publicschools, swimming pools,
and neighborhoods were
often the first to experiencedesegregation.
Millions of whiteSoutherners foundchampions in politicianssuch as Alabama’s governor,
George Wallace, who both
cultivated and exploited forpolitical gain a deep anti-civilrights sentiment. In his 1963
inaugural address, Wallace
declared: “Segregation now,segregation tomorrow,segregation forever.” Hebecame the very picture ofwhite resistance. Membersof the Ku Klux Klan — aviolent organization driven
by racism, anti-Semitism,and nativism — persisted
in a similar delusion: thatthe bloodshed they inflicted
could postpone the day of
racial equality. In 1963 in
Birmingham, Alabama,
Klansmen bombed a black
Baptist church and killed fourgirls. The next year, Klansmen
in Philadelphia, Mississippi,
murdered three civil rights
workers and buried themunder an earthen dam. Suchgruesome violence sickened
many white Southerners,

and rifts emerged within thewhite South. Still, a majority
desired the same end — areturn to the nostalgic days
when blacks doffed their hats
to whites and acquiesced totheir roles in the segregatedJim Crow order.
Extremism on one sideoften handed victory to theother. The Klan’s horrifying
violence pricked white
America’s conscience and,ultimately, moved the nation
closer to passage of epic civilrights legislation — the 1964
Civil Rights Act and the 1965
Voting Rights Act. When
President Lyndon Johnson,
himself a native Texan and aSoutherner, helped usher thelegislation through Congress,
white Southerners felt
betrayed.
The Civil Rights Act
integrated businesses andpublic facilities. Suddenly,
whites had to serve blacks
in their stores and dine
beside them at restaurants.
Such changes shattered therhythm of white southerners’
daily lives. Many whites
denounced the “Civil Wrongs
Bill,” holding that such federal
laws imperiled their own
rights. They clung to thenotion that rights were finite,
and that as blacks gained
freedom, whites must suffera loss of their own liberties.
On the precarious seesawof Southern race relations,whites thought they would
plummet if blacks ascended.

FREE AT LAST: THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT 63

Throughout black-majority
areas, the Voting Rights Act
granted African Americans
a stunning new power. In
these citadels of the oldslave South, where whites
were outnumbered by aratio of almost four-to-one,
blacks voted some of theirown into political office. In
several rural locales, like
Macon County and Greene
County, Alabama, African
Americans suddenly wielded
political power. Before thecivil rights years, few whites
could have conceived ofsuch transformations. By
the 1970s, the previously
unthinkable became politicalreality.

The civil rights movement
forever altered whiteSoutherners’ everyday lives,
upended their traditional
attitudes about blacks, and,in some towns, shifted thebalance of political power.
It stripped the veneersof docility from African
Americans and invested
them with a new dignity.
Life seemed unrecognizable
to many white Southerners.
Confronted with a reality
they had barely contemplated,some whites retaliated withany weapons at their disposal.
Others attempted to avoid
the upheaval; they tried tomaintain cherished ways oflife even as the ground shiftedbeneath their feet. In the end,
evasion proved impossible.

Lunchtime in an integrated public school.

64 FREE AT LAST: THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT

While whites fought thecivil rights movementwith varying strategies ofresistance, few escaped its
long reach.
In the end, the civil rights
movement transformed
the South and the nation.
As it changed Southerners’
lives and minds, somewhites felt they had beenliberated — freed fromthe mandate to degrade
and oppress, free from theroles they assumed in theconstricting racial hierarchy.
Into the 21st century,
however, racial inequality
continues to haunt American
life. Black Americans
remain disproportionately
impoverished, imprisoned,
and undereducated. Yet many

ghosts of the Jim Crow South
have vanished. After the civilrights movement, African
Americans could attend
integrated schools, they ran
for — and won — political
office, and they lived witha dignity that the cultureof Jim Crow had denied.
These changes also seeped
into white Southern life andreshaped its very contours.
The civil rights movement
pushed Southerners, black
and white alike, further
along the path toward racialequality.

By Jason Sokol
A Mellon Postdoctoral
Fellow at the University ofPennsylvania, Sokol is also
the author of There Goes My
Everything: White Southerners
in the Age of Civil Rights.

Epilogue

On March 21, 1965,
as civil rights
advocates and theirsupporters gathered in Selma,a local Southern Christian
Leadership Conference
leader warned the press
that the “irresponsibility” ofthe more militant activists
might cause the movement
enormous harm. The
Reverend Jefferson P. Rogers
was referring to the Student
Nonviolent Coordinating
Committee, whose leadershipwas growing increasingly
impatient with the gradualist
strategy of Martin LutherKing and the mainstream
civil rights movement. Nearly
every broad-based social
movement faces similartensions, but the years anddecades that followed would
prove the wisdom of thestrategy pursued by Thurgood

Marshall, King, and theothers. The great triumphsof the civil rights movement
were evidence that, in anation of laws, the key toprogress lay in establishing
the real legal equality of
African Americans — inpublic facilities, in places of
education, and, most of all, atthe voting booth.
But this truth was not
yet apparent. By May
1966, Stokley Carmichael,veteran of numerous voter
registration drives, hadestablished himself as the
new head of SNCC. In
a speech at Greenwood,
Mississippi, Carmichaelraised a call for “BlackPower.” Where Thurgood
Marshall and Martin
Luther King Jr. had sought
integration, Carmichaelinstead sought separation.

Integration, he said, was “aninsidious subterfuge, forthe maintenance of white
supremacy.” Meanwhile,
the Black Panther Party,(some accounts trace thename to a visual emblem for
illiterate voters used in an
Alabama voter registration
drive) founded in Oakland,
California, in October 1966by activists Huey P. Newton
and Bobby Seale, employed
armed members — “Panthers”— to shadow police officers
whom they believed unfairly
targeted blacks. While
the party briefly enjoyeda measure of popularity,
particularly through its social
services programs, armed
altercations with local police
resulted in the death or
jailing of prominent Panthers,
turned many Americans
against its violent ways, andMore than at any time in our nation’s
history, we are all Americans.

fragmented the Panthermovement. It petered out ina maze of factionalism andmutual recriminations.
The year 1968 was one ofpolitical upheaval throughout
much of the Western world.
In the United States, that year
would see the assassinationof Senator Robert F. Kennedy,
who as attorney general had
provided timely assistance tocivil rights activists. And it
would see the end of King’s
remarkable career.
It was a measure of thecivil rights movement’s
accomplishments in securing
legal equality that King
dedicated his last years
to fighting for economic
equality. On April 3, 1968,
he campaigned in Memphis,
Tennessee, on behalf of

FREE AT LAST: THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT 65

striking — and primarily
black — sanitation workers.
King’s last address drewstrongly on his lifelong studyof the Bible. It would prove
prophetic:
Well, I don’t know what
will happen now; we’ve
got some difficult days
ahead. But it reallydoesn’t matter with me
now, because I’ve been
to the mountaintop.
And I don’t mind. Like
anybody, I would liketo live a long life —longevity has its place.
But I’m not concerned
about that now. I justwant to do God’s will.
And He’s allowed me to
go up to the mountain.
And I’ve looked over, andI’ve seen the Promised
Land. I may not get therewith you. But I want you
to know tonight that we,
as a people, will get to
the Promised Land. And
so I’m happy tonight;
I’m not worried about
anything; I’m not fearing
any man. Mine eyes
have seen the glory of thecoming of the Lord.
An assassin’s bullet took
King’s life the very next day.
He was 39 years old. The
medical examiners said hedied with the heart of a 60
year old, because King hadfor so long carried the burdenof so many. Some 300,000
Americans attended
his funeral.

Owning a home long has been alarge part of the American Dream.
Left: Forty-two years after her friend
Denise McNair was murdered by
racist vigilantes, Condoleezza Rice
took office as the nation’s Secretaryof State.

The murder of Martin
Luther King Jr. set off riots
in Washington, D.C., andin more than 100 other
American cities. At thatmoment, the short of visionand the faint of heart might
have questioned King’s life
work. But the Promised Land
that King described was inmany ways far closer than it
seemed on those angry, fire-lit
nights of April 1968.

66 FREE AT LAST: THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENTThe Triumphs of the Civil
Rights Movement
The historical experienceof African Americans
will always be unique.
But meaningful federal
enforcement of the rightto vote equipped black
Americans with the toolsthat immigrants and otherminority groups long haveused to pursue — and achieve— the American Dream. In
the United States, people

who vote wield real politicalpower. With the vote — andthe passage of time — legal
and political equality for
African Americans has
produced gains in nearly
every walk of life.
John R. Lewis, for example,
was one of the Freedom
Riders beaten bloody by theMontgomery mob in 1961.
Today he represents Georgia’s
Fifth District in the U.S.
House of Representatives.
Nearly 50 of his colleagues
are African Americans,and several of them wield
great political power aschairpersons of inﬂuential
congressional committees.

the law; a Constitutionthat promised its people
liberty, and justice, anda union that could be
and should be perfected
over time.
And, as the President-electtold the nation on the night of
his electoral triumph
President-elect Barack
Obama addresses a
Chicago crowd on thenight of his election to
the presidency .

In 1963, Denise McNair
was among the girls killed
when racist vigilantes
bombed Birmingham’s
Sixteenth Street Baptist
Church. In 2005, her friend
Condoleezza Rice took officeas the nation’s secretaryof state.
Black secondary school
graduation rates have nearly
tripled since 1966, and therate of poverty has beennearly halved in that time.
The emergence of a black
middle class is a widely notedsocial development, as are
the many successful AfricanAmerican entrepreneurs,
scholars, and literary andartistic achievers.
Although Americans
continue to wrestle with
racial issues, those issues
differ profoundly from thoseaddressed by Thurgood
Marshall, Martin LutherKing, and the civil rights
movement. While today’squestions are no less real,

they also reflect the genuine
progress achieved over the
decades that followed.
Consider education, thesubject of the Brown v. Boardof Education decision. Recent
Supreme Court decisions
explore the permissible
limits of “affirmative action”
policies that seek to redress
past discrimination andto require or encouragethat public institutions
reflect demographically thecommunities they serve.
Judges are now asked todecide the competing needs
in, for example, a school
district that allows all parents
to select their children’s
school. If too many request aparticular school, only somestudents may attend theirfirst-choice institution. In
that case, may the district
assert, even as a “tiebreaker,”its desire to maintain a racialbalance in that popular
school to determine which
requests will be honored?

Should government
intervene when schools are
effectively segregated becauseof new housing patterns, andnot, as in Linda Brown’s day,because millions of AfricanAmerican students were
purposely segregated andrelegated to shabby, inferiorschools?
Americans of all stripes
can and do disagree overissues like this. And few
American leaders haveanswers to these dilemmas.
As this book goes to press,
Barack Obama, the son of a
black man from Kenya and awhite woman from Kansas,
has been elected Presidentof the United States. In a
campaign speech on race inAmerica, Obama said that

If there is anyone out
there who still doubtsthat America is aplace where all things
are possible; who still
wonders if the dreamof our founders is alivein our time; who stillquestions the power ofour democracy, tonight isyour answer.
Obama’s victory is one
measure of the nation’s
progress. Another measure,surely the most importantof all, is the emergence, notleast among the younger
Americans who will build
the nation’s future, of a broadand deep consensus that theshameful histories of slavery,
segregation, and disadvantage
must be relegated to the past.

the answer to the slaveryquestion was alreadyembedded within
our Constitution — aConstitution that had at
its very core the ideal ofequal citizenship under
FREE AT LAST: THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT 67

Michael Jay Friedman, the author of this volume’s principal
text, is Division Chief for Print Publications at the Department ofState’s Bureau of International Information Programs. He holds
a PhD in U.S. political and diplomatic history.

GPS Printed by Global Publishing Solutions (A/ISS/GPS) © (09-20094-E-1.0)

Executive Editor: George Clack
Editor-in-Chief: Mildred Solá Neely
Managing Editor: Michael Jay Friedman
Art Director: Min-Chih Yao
Photo Research: Maggie Johnson Sliker

U.S. DEPARTMENT OF STATE
Bureau of International Information Programs
2008
http://www.america.gov

Photo credits:
Picture credits for illustrations appearing top to bottom areseparated by dashes and from left to right by semicolons.
Cover: AP Images (4). Inside Front Cover: AP Images.
Page 3: Schomburg Center/Art Resource, NY. 4: British Library/
London/Great Britain/HIP/Art Resource, NY. 6: Hulton Archive/
Getty Images. 8: The Bridgeman Art Library/Getty Images.
9: Library of Congress. 10: Hulton Archive/Getty Images.
11: Painting by Jerry Pinkney, National Geographic Society.
12: MPI/Getty Images. 13: Hulton Archive/Getty Images —Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.
14: Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.
16: Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.
17: Louie Psihoyos/Science Faction. 18: Library of Congress,
Prints and Photographs Division. 19: © CORBIS.
20: Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.
21: AP Images. 22: Marie Hansen/Time Life Pictures/Getty
Images. 24: Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs
Division. 25: © David J. & Janice L. Frent Collection/CORBIS.
26: Scurlock Studio Records, Archives Center, National
Museum of American History, Behring Center, Smithsonian
Institution. 27: Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs
Division; AP Images. 28: Virginia Historical Society, withpermission from Afro-American Newspaper Archives
and Research Center. 29: © Bettmann/CORBIS —© Jack Moebes/CORBIS; AP Images. 31: AP Images.
33: © Bettmann/CORBIS — AP Images. 35: Don Cravens/Time Life Pictures/Getty Images — Montgomery County
Sheriff’s Office/AP Images. 36: © Bettmann/CORBIS.
37: Sy Kattelson, Gelatin silver print, 1948, National Portrait
Gallery, Smithsonian Institution. 38: © Bettmann/CORBIS (2).
39: Paul Schutzer/Time Life Pictures/Getty Images.
40: Horace W. Cort/AP Images; © Bettmann/CORBIS.
43: Bill Hudson/AP Images. 44: Harry Harry/AP Images.Hulton
Archives/CNP/Getty Images. 46: Carlos Osorio/AP Images— Gene Herrick/AP Images. 47: Lacy Adkins/AP Images.
48: © Bettmann/CORBIS. 49: Landall Kyle Carter/CORBIS.
50: AP Images. 51: © Bettmann/CORBIS. 52: © Flip Schulke/
CORBIS (2). 55: AP Images. 56: AP Images; Dozier Mobley/AP
Images — AP Images. 58,59: AP Images (3).
60: © Flip Schulke/CORBIS. 62-63: © Bettmann/CORBIS;
Hoarce W. Cort/AP Images. 64: Bill Eppridge/Time Life
Pictures/Getty Images. 65: Digital Vision/Getty Images.
66: Ariel Skelley/Getty Images — Bebeto Matthews/
AP images.

FREE
AT

LAST
THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT

Bureau of International Information Programs
U.S. Department of State
http://www.america.gov