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AT
“I Have A Dream”: The August, 1963 March on Washington for Jobs 

and Freedom was the largest political demonstration the nation had ever 

seen. 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.

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AT
— 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 8

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 Respond 

to 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

CONTENTS
— 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 Does

SPOTLIGHT: White Southerners’ Reactions to the Civil Rights Movement

Epilogue 65

The Triumphs of the Civil Rights Movement
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— 1 —

Among the antiquities displayed at the United 

Nations headquarters in New York is a replica 

of the Cyrus Cylinder. Named for Cyrus the 

Great, ruler of the Persian Empire and conqueror 

of Babylonia, the document dates to about 539 B.C. Cyrus 

guaranteed to his subjects many of what we today call civil 

rights, 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 is 

a nation built on these civil rights, on the soaring ideals 

enshrined in its Declaration of Independence and the 

legal protections formalized in its Constitution, and most 

prominently, 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 found 

unprecedented economic opportunity and greater personal, 

political, and religious liberty in the New World, black 

Africans were transported there involuntarily, often in 

chains, to be sold as chattel slaves and compelled to labor 

for “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 and 

in 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 principles 

of equality and justice and the inequality, injustice, and 

oppression faced by millions of their fellow citizens.

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 

slaves and that the Hebrews, upon their exodus from Egypt, 

used slaves of their own. Early Christianity accepted the 

practice, 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 (now 

Istanbul) in 1453 disturbed trade patterns and deprived 

sweet-toothed Europeans of highly prized sugar. Led by the 

Portuguese, 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 African 

slaves to work the land and, especially in the Caribbean, to 

Slavery Spreadsto America

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

April 1860. 
4 FREE AT LAST: THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT

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 the 

prominent role that crops such as sugar, tobacco, cotton, and 

spices 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 were 

powerful. 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 trade 

that sent textiles, rum, and manufactured goods to Africa, 

slaves to the Americas, and sugar, tobacco and cotton to 

Europe.) 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 the 

United States.

Slavery Takes Hold

The very first slaves in British North America arrived by 

accident. Twelve years after the 1607 founding of the first 

permanent British settlement, at Jamestown, Virginia, a 

privateer docked there with some “20 and odd Negros” it had 

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 source 

of labor in the fledgling Virginia colony. The landowning 

elites preferred to rely on “indentured” white labor. Under 

this arrangement, potential European immigrants signed an 

indenture, 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 of 

particularly 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 willing 

to 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 

An 1823 drawing depicts slaves cutting sugar cane on the Caribbean 

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

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 most 

importantly, 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, the 

American inventor Eli Whitney produced the first cotton 

gin, a mechanical device that removed cotton seeds from the 

surrounding cotton fiber. This spurred a dramatic expansion 

in cotton cultivation throughout the Lower South, one 

that expanded westward through Alabama, Mississippi, 

and Louisiana and into Texas. About one million AfricanAmerican slaves moved westward during the period 1790-

1860, nearly twice the number carried to the United States 

from Africa.

Slave Life and Institutions

African-American slaves were compelled to work hard, and in 

some 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 this 

dominion ... 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 all 

punishment ... as if such accident never happened.

This code also required that slaves obtain written 

permission before leaving their plantation. It authorized 

whipping, branding, and maiming as punishment for even 

minor offenses. Some codes forbade teaching slaves how to 

read 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, they 

labored under material conditions by some measures 

comparable 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, but 

slaves 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 and 

social 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 that 

most 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 that 

prevailed among white southerners. Some masters feared 

that Christian tenets would undermine their justifications for 

slavery, but others encouraged their slaves to attend church, 

although in a separate, “blacks-only” section.

After exposure to Christianity, many slaves then 

established their own parallel, or underground, churches. 

These churches often blended Christianity with aspects 

of the slaves’ former African religious cultures and beliefs. 

Religious services commonly incorporated shouting, dance, 

and the call-and-response interactions that would later feature 

prominently in the great sermons of Dr. Martin Luther King 

Jr. and other leading black preachers. The black church often 

emphasized different aspects of the Christian tradition than 

did southern white churches. Where the latter might interpret 

the biblical Curse of Ham (“a servant of servants shall he be 

unto 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 measure 

of solace and hope. After the American Civil War brought 

an end to slavery, black churches and denominational 

organizations grew in membership, influence, and 

organizational strength, factors that would prove vital to the 

success of the civil rights movement.

Family Bonds

The slaves’ tight family bonds would prove a similar source 

of 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, and 

durability of the nuclear family under slavery.” Slaves were 

typically housed as extended family units. Slave children, 

historian C. Vann Woodward writes, at least “were assured 

a childhood, one exempt from labor and degradation past 

the age when working-class children of England and France 

were condemned to mine and factory.”
6 FREE AT LAST: THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT

The African-American family structure adapted to meet 

the challenges posed by slavery, and later by discrimination 

and economic inequality. Many black family units resembled 

extended clans rather than smaller, immediate families. Some 

were 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 Caribbean 

colonies and in Brazil, slave mortality rates exceeded birth 

rates, but blacks in the United States reproduced at the same 

rate 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 of 

slaves, their numbers increased from 1.2 million to nearly 

4 million on the eve of the Civil War in 1861.

Slavery brought Africans to America and deprived them 

of 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 triumphant 

civil 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.

A drawing, circa 1860, 

depicts a black preacher 

addressing his mixed-race 

congregation on a South 

Carolina plantation.
FREE AT LAST: THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT 7

African-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 and 

by shaping the thought of its 

leaders, Rosa Parks and the 

Reverend Martin Luther King 

Jr. among them.

Enslaved and free AfricanAmericans formed their 

own congregations as early 

as 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); the 

National Baptist Convention, 

USA, Incorporated; the 

National Baptist Convention 

of 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 a 

host of other traditions.

The great gift, indeed 

genius, of African-American 

religious sensibility is its 

drive to forge a common 

identity. Black slaves from 

different parts of Africa were 

transported 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 successful 

means of solving deep-seated 

conflict: the techniques 

of civil disobedience and 

nonviolence. The black 

church also supplied black 

political activists with a 

powerful philosophy: to focus 

upon an ultimate solution for 

all rather than palliatives for 

a 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 that 

sought to make sense of 

a tragic history and move 

toward a future, not just for 

themselves, but also for their 

nation and the world.

In short, while some form 

of resistance to slavery and 

then Jim Crow segregation 

probably was inevitable, the 

communal spirituality of 

the black church in the face 

of repression helped spawn 

a civil rights movement 

that sought its objectives by 

peaceful means.

Many of the powerful 

voices of the civil rights 

movement — King, of course, 

but also such powerful and 

significant figures as U.S. 

Representatives Barbara 

Jordan and John Lewis, the 

political activist and Baptist 

minister Jesse Jackson, and 

the gospel legend Mahalia 

Jackson — all were formed 

from their worship life in 

the black church. Indeed, 

King’s role as chief articulator 

of civil rights reflects the 

direct relationship between 

African-American religious 

communities and the struggle 

for racial and social justice 

in the United States. The 

spiritual influence of AfricanAmerican religious practice 

spread beyond this nation’s 

shores, as global leaders 

such as Nelson Mandela and 

Archbishop Desmond Tutu 

learned from King how to 

embody a loving, inclusive 

African and Christian 

identity.

Today’s African-American 

communal spirituality is as 

strong and engaged as ever. 

Black churches work to craft 

responses to contemporary 

challenges such as the spread 

of HIV/AIDS, the need to 

ameliorate poverty, and the 

disproportionate recidivism 

of imprisoned African 

Americans. The search 

toward common identity 

remains the foundation of 

such a spirituality, however. 

Through the election of 

the first African-American 

president and the increase 

of minorities in higher 

education, the journey toward 

common identity remains 

on course. 

In sum, the black church 

helped African Americans 

survive the harshest forms 

of 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 civil 

rights movement — creative, 

inclusive, and nonviolent.

By Michael Battle

Ordained a priest by 

Archbishop Desmond 

Tutu, 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.

The Genius of the Black Church

FREE AT LAST: THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT 7
8 FREE AT LAST: THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT

— 2 —

“Three-Fifths ofOtherPersons”

A Promise Deferred

During the 19th and early 20th centuries, 

African Americans and their white 

allies employed many strategies as 

they fought to end slavery and then 

to 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 to 

build 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 new 

staple crop — “King Cotton” — and on the slave-intensive 

plantations that cultivated it, the prospect of a clash with 

increasingly antislavery northern states grew. The young 

nation delayed that conflict with a series of moral evasions and 

political compromises.

The United States’ Declaration of Independence (1776) 

includes stirring language on universal brotherhood: “We 

hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created 

equal, 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 the 

Continental Congress, America’s de facto government at the 

time, 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 that 

political expediency would trump moral imperatives.

By 1787, many Americans had determined to replace 

the existing loose, decentralized alliance of 13 states with a 

stronger 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 were 

actually abolitionist in their views ... there was not a feel for 

abolition in the country at the time.”

Because any proposed constitution would not take effect 

until ratified by 9 of the 13 states, it became necessary to reach 

a compromise on the status of the African-American slaves. 

Northern delegates to the convention, led by James Wilson 

of Pennsylvania, reached an agreement with three large 

slaveholding states. Both sides agreed that every five “unfree 

persons” — slaves — would count as three people when 

calculating 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.)

Depiction of George Washington with his black field workers on his Mount 

Vernon, Virginia, estate, 1757. 
FREE AT LAST: THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT 9

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 the 

whites, 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 for 

the young nation. In the hotly contested presidential election 

of 1800, the additional electoral votes awarded southern states 

by virtue of their slave populations supplied Thomas Jefferson 

with 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, 

Congress hammered out a number of compromises that 

generally ensured that states allowing slavery would enter 

the Union paired with new states that prohibited it. The 

Missouri Compromise, the Compromise of 1850, and the 

Kansas-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 to 

secure for African Americans the civil rights enjoyed by their 

white countrymen, brave men and women were launching 

efforts to abolish slavery and to ensure that the United States 

would live up to its own best ideals.

This map of the United States in 1857 depicts the “free” states in dark 

green, slave states in red and light red, and the territories (American lands 

not yet admitted to statehood) in light green.
10 FREE AT LAST: THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT

The Pen of Frederick Douglass

Although the U.S. political system 

proved unable to dislodge slavery from 

the American South, the “peculiar 

institution,” as southerners often 

called it, did not go unchallenged. 

Determined women and men — 

blacks and whites — devoted their 

lives to the cause of abolition, the 

legal prohibition of slavery. They 

employed an array of tactics, both 

violent and nonviolent. And just 

as in Martin Luther King’s day, the 

pen and the appeal to conscience 

would 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 the 

sentiment expressed in 1858 by a 

senatorial 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 to 

Frederick Douglass, an escaped slave, journalist, publisher, 

and champion of liberty. Douglass was born into slavery in 

either 1817 or 1818. His mistress defied Maryland state law 

by teaching the boy to read. At age 13 he purchased his first 

book, 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 hand 

and 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 sympathized 

with me at once, and from having been remarkably quiet, 

became much excited.” The convention organizers agreed. 

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 rights 

that the U.S. Constitution afforded other Americans. On a 

number of occasions, racist mobs attacked these abolitionist 

gatherings, but other whites befriended Douglass and 

championed his cause. After one mob knocked out the teeth 

of a white colleague who saved Douglass from violent attack, 

Douglass wrote his friend: “I shall never forget how like two 

very brothers we were ready to dare, do, and even die for each 

other.” Douglass praised his colleague’s willingness to leave 

a “life of ease and even luxury ... against the wishes of your 

father and many of your friends,” instead to do “something 

toward breaking the fetters of the slave and elevating the 

dispised [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 no 

just 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 for 

a 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 was 

just over $700.

An anti-slavery meeting in Boston, 1835, attracts both whites and free blacks.
FREE AT LAST: THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT 11

In Great Britain, Douglass was exposed to a more 

politically aggressive brand of abolitionism. When he 

returned to the United States in 1847, Douglass broke with 

William Lloyd Garrison. Garrison favored purely moral and 

nonviolent 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 a 

range 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 a 

station on the Underground Railroad (the name given to a 

network of people who helped fugitive slaves escape to the 

North) 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 causes 

of equal rights for blacks and for women. Its motto was “Right 

is 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 vice 

president on an Equal Rights Party ticket headed by Victoria 

Claflin Woodhull, the United States’ first woman presidential 

candidate.

Douglass campaigned for Abraham Lincoln in the 

1860 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 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.” Too old himself to fight, Douglass recruited black 

soldiers 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 to 

conciliate 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 black 

soldiers, and the following year he flatly rejected suggestions to 

enter into peace negotiations before the South agreed to abolish 

slavery. The president twice invited Douglass to meet with him 

at the White House. Douglass later wrote of Lincoln that “in 

his 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 — the 

postwar amendments that spelled out rights that applied 

to all men, not just to whites, and prohibited the individual 

states from denying those rights. While it would take a later 

generation of brave civil rights champions to ensure that 

these 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 the 

capital 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. His 

contemporaries, both white and African American pursued a 

variety of tactics to combat slavery and win blacks their civil 

rights. In a nation that was half slave and half free, one obvious 

tactic was to spirit slaves northward to freedom. Members 

of several religious denominations took the lead. Beginning 

around 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 and 

return 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.
12 FREE AT LAST: THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT

Evangelical Methodists, Presbyterians, and Congregationalists 

subsequently joined the effort, which expanded to help greater 

numbers of escaped slaves find their way out of the South. 

Free blacks came to assume increasingly prominent roles 

in 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 or 

more slaves to a “station,” typically the home of a sympathizing 

“stationmaster,” then to another station, and so on, until the 

slaves 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. After 

reaching freedom in 1849, Tubman returned to the South 

on 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 as 

a 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, and 

John Brown called her “General Tubman.”

In 1850, a sectional political compromise resulted in the 

passage 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 to 

escaped slaves. It imposed heavy penalties on federal marshals 

who failed to enforce its terms, and on anyone who gave 

assistance to an escaped slave. The Underground Railroad 

now was forced to adopt more aggressive tactics, including 

daring rescues of blacks from courtrooms and even from 

the custody of federal marshals.

While the numbers of agents, stationmasters, and 

conductors 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.

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 

slave masters. They could look for inspiration to Haiti, where 

native resistance expelled the French colonizers, ended their 

slave-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 their 

present bondage.” In the American South, white plantation 

owners feared he might be right, and they reacted brutally to 

even 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 and 

a group of between 50 and 75 slaves armed themselves with 

knives, hatchets, and axes. Over two days, they moved from 

house to house, freeing the slaves they met and killing more 

than 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 ever 

before. Meanwhile in Boston, William Lloyd Garrison tarred 

as hypocrites those who blamed the antislavery movement for 

Turner’s revolt. The slaves, Garrison argued, had fought for the 

A depiction of the 1831 Virginia slave rebellion led by Nat Turner.
FREE AT LAST: THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT 13

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 find 

them in their stripes — in their emaciated bodies — in their 

ceaseless toil — in their ignorant minds — in every field, in 

every 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 across 

the ocean, invitations to resistance above, below, around 

them! What more do they need? Surrounded by such 

influences, 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

Another famous effort to free the 

African-American slaves by the 

sword was led by a white American. 

John Brown, a native New 

Englander, had long mulled the idea 

of achieving abolition by force and 

had, in 1847, confided to Frederick 

Douglass his intent to do precisely 

that. In 1855, Brown arrived in 

the Kansas Territory, scene of 

violent clashes between pro- and 

antislavery factions. At issue was 

whether Kansas would be admitted 

to the Union as a “free-soil” or slave 

state. 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, descending 

on the slaveholding village of Pottawatomie and killing five 

men. 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 from 

leading 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 and 

head south, liberating additional slaves as they marched. 

But Brown delayed too long and soon was surrounded by a 

company 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 and 

captured 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 have 

always freely admitted I have done in behalf of His despised 

poor, was not wrong, but right. Now, if it is deemed 

necessary that I should forfeit my life for the furtherance of 

the ends of justice, and mingle my blood further with the 

blood of my children and with the blood of millions in this 

slave 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, a 

martyr to the antislavery cause. In the Civil War 

that began a year later, Union soldiers marched to 

variants 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, 

His soul is marching on! Harper’s Ferry, Virginia (now West Virginia), site of John Brown’s 

infamous raid.

John Brown, pictured here 

circa 1859, led an ill-fated 

raid on Harpers Ferry, West 

Virginia (then Virginia), in 

hopes of sparking a wider 

slave rebellion. 
14 FREE AT LAST: THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT

Abraham Lincoln depicted against the 

text of his Emancipation Proclamation, 

which freed all slaves in the still rebellious 

territories, effective January 1, 1863.
FREE AT LAST: THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT 15

The American Civil War

The issue of slavery and the status of black Americans eroded 

relations between North and South from the first days of 

American 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 white 

southerners considered Lincoln’s election a threat to their 

social order. Beginning with South Carolina in December 

1860, 11 southern states seceded from the Union, forming the 

Confederate States of America.

For Lincoln and for millions of northerners, the Union 

was, as the historian James M. McPherson has written, “a 

bond 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 break 

up the government whenever they choose.” Thus, as Lincoln 

made clear early in the war: “My paramount object in this 

struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to 

destroy 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 came 

into 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 base 

and 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 certain 

that 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 the 

slave quarters than usual. It was bolder, had more ring, 

and lasted later into the night. Most of the verses of the 

plantation 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 long 

paper — the Emancipation Proclamation, I think. After 

the reading we were told that we were all free, and could go 

when and where we pleased. My mother, who was standing 

by my side, leaned over and kissed her children, while tears 

of joy ran down her cheeks. She explained to us what it all 

meant, that this was the day for which she had been so long 

praying, but fearing that she would never live to see.

As a condition of regaining their congressional 

representation, the seceding states were obliged to ratify the 

Thirteenth, 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 barred 

voting 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, the 

plain meaning of these laws would be ignored for nearly 

another century, as the politics of sectional compromise again 

would trump justice for African Americans.
Black Soldiers in the Civil War

When the 

American Civil 

War began 

in 1861, Jacob Dodson, a 

free black man living in 

Washington, D.C., wrote 

to Secretary of War Simon 

Cameron informing him 

that he knew of “300 reliable 

colored free citizens” who 

wanted to enlist and defend 

the city. Cameron replied 

that “this department has 

no intention at present to 

call into the service of the 

government any colored 

soldiers.” It didn’t matter that 

black men, slave and free, had 

served in colonial militias and 

had fought on both sides of 

the Revolutionary War. Many 

black men felt that serving in 

the military was a way they 

might gain freedom and full 

citizenship. 

Why did many military 

and civilian leaders reject 

the idea of recruiting black 

soldiers? Some said that 

black troops would prove too 

cowardly to fight white men, 

others said that they would 

be inferior fighters, and some 

thought that white soldiers 

would not serve with black 

soldiers. There were a few 

military leaders, though, who 

had different ideas.

On March 31, 1862, almost 

a 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 control 

of the islands off the coasts 

of northern Florida, Georgia, 

and South Carolina. Local 

whites who owned the rich 

cotton and rice plantations 

fled to the Confederatecontrolled (southern) 

mainland. Most of their slaves 

remained on the islands, 

and they soon were joined 

by black escapees from the 

mainland who believed they 

would be liberated if only they 

could reach the Union lines. It 

would not be that simple.

Even as Hunter needed 

more soldiers to control the 

region’s many tidal rivers 

and islands against stubborn 

Confederate guerrilla 

resistance, 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 just 

on the islands but throughout Confederate-controlled 

South Carolina, Georgia, and 

Florida — and to recruit black 

men capable of bearing arms 

as Union soldiers. He would 

attempt to train and form the 

first all-black regiment of the 

Civil War.

News traveled slowly in 

those days, and President 

Abraham Lincoln did not 

hear 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 the 

slaveholding border states 

that had sided with the 

Union — would allow. He 

also was adamant that “no 

commanding general shall 

do such a thing, upon my 

responsibility, without 

consulting me.” In an angry 

Frederick 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
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 to 

emancipate slaves at a time 

of his choosing. Hunter 

was ordered to disband the 

regiment, but the seed he 

planted soon sprouted.

In August 1862, two 

weeks after Hunter had 

dismantled his regiment, the 

War Department allowed 

General Rufus Saxton to raise 

the Union Army’s first official 

black regiment, the First South 

Carolina Volunteers. This 

and other black regiments 

organized in the coastal 

regions successfully defended 

and held the coastal islands for 

the duration of the war. 

The First Kansas 

Colored Volunteers was 

also organized around this 

time, but without official 

War Department sanction. 

Meanwhile, President 

Lincoln had carefully laid the 

groundwork for emancipation 

and the inclusion of men 

of African descent into the 

military. As white northerners 

increasingly understood that 

black 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 recruit 

and enlist black troops for 

newly formed regiments 

of the Union Army — the 

United States Colored Troops 

(USCT). All of the officers 

in these regiments, however, 

would be white.

By the fall of 1864, some 

140 black regiments had been 

raised in many northern 

states 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 segregated 

from their white 

counterparts, they fought the 

same battles. Black troops 

performed bravely and 

successfully even though 

they coped with both the 

Confederate enemy and the 

suspicion of some of their 

Union military colleagues.

Once black men were 

accepted into the military, 

they were limited in 

many cases to garrison 

and fatigue duty. The 

famed Massachusetts 

54th Regiment’s Colonel 

Robert Gould Shaw actively 

petitioned superiors to give 

his men a chance to engage in 

battle and prove themselves 

as soldiers. Some of the other 

officers who knew what their 

men could do did the same. 

Black troops had to fight to 

get the same pay as white 

soldiers. Some regiments 

refused to accept lower pay. 

It was not until 1865, the year 

the war ended, that Congress 

passed a law providing equal 

pay for black soldiers.

Despite these restrictions, 

the United States Colored 

Troops successfully 

participated in 449 military 

engagements, 39 of them 

major battles. They fought 

in battles in South Carolina, 

Louisiana, Florida, Virginia, 

Tennessee, Alabama, and 

other states. They bravely 

stormed forts and faced 

artillery knowing that if 

captured by the enemy, they 

would not be given the rights 

of prisoners of war, but instead 

would be sold into slavery. 

The black troops performed 

with honor and valor all of 

the duties of soldiers. 

Despite the Army’s policy 

of only having white officers, 

eventually about 100 black 

soldiers rose from the ranks 

and were commissioned as 

officers. Eight black surgeons 

also 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 the 

desegregation of the armed 

forces. Today’s military 

remains an engine of social 

and economic opportunity 

for black Americans. But 

it was the sacrifices of the 

Civil War-era black soldiers 

that paved the way for the 

full acceptance of African 

Americans in the United 

States military. More 

fundamentally, their efforts 

were an important part 

of the struggle of African 

Americans for liberty and 

dignity. 

By Joyce Hansen

A four-time winner of the 

Coretta Scott King Honor 

Book Award, Joyce Hansen 

has published short 

stories and 15 books of 

contemporary and historical 

fiction and non-fiction for 

young readers, including 

Between Two Fires: Black 

Soldiers in the Civil War.

With the Emancipation Proclamation, 

the Union (Northern) Army began 

actively to recruit African-American 

soldiers.

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

— 3 —

“SeparatebutEqual” 

African Americans Respond to the Failure

of Reconstruction 

More than 600,000 Americans perished in 

the Civil War. Their sacrifice resolved some 

of the nation’s most intractable conflicts. 

Slavery at last was prohibited, and the 

principle that no state could secede from the Union was 

established. 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 a 

preference 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 willing 

to employ federal power to promote economic development. 

Its core belief was often called “free labor.” For millions of 

northerners, free labor meant that a man — the concept then 

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 and 

abilities 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 a 

flat-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 

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.
FREE AT LAST: THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT 19

hierarchy dominated by the aristocracy of slaveholders.”

After the North’s military victory ended slavery, its freelabor ideology required that the freedmen possess their civil 

rights. During the years that followed the Civil War, northern 

Republicans at first were determined to “reconstruct” the 

South along free-labor principles. Although many white 

southerners resisted, northern military might for a time 

ensured 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 elevated 

Vice President Andrew Johnson to the presidency. Johnson, a 

Tennessee Democrat chosen as Lincoln’s 1864 running mate 

to signal moderation and a desire for postwar reconciliation, 

moved swiftly to readmit the former Confederate states to 

full membership in the Union. Southern states were obliged 

to ratify the Thirteenth Amendment, prohibiting slavery. 

But they were not required to protect the equality and 

civil rights of their African-American populations. Whitedominated southern state governments organized under 

Johnson’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 

as vagrants former slaves who left their plantations without 

permission. Meanwhile, Johnson ordered the restoration of 

abandoned southern plantations to their former slave-master 

owners. 

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 seat 

members 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 black 

children, and helped freed slaves negotiate labor contracts 

with their former owners and other employers.

A second law, the Civil Rights Act of 1866, declared 

that 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 to 

subvert the application of these and other measures, the 

House of Representatives in 1868 impeached (indicted) 

Johnson, thus initiating the constitutionally proscribed 

method for removing a president from office. The Senate 

acquitted Johnson by one vote, but for the 

remainder of his term, he mostly refrained from 

challenging Congress’s reconstruction program.

Most important of all, Congress made 

clear 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 bedrock 

on which the modern civil rights movement 

would stake its claim for racial equality. The 

first 10 amendments, known collectively as the 

Bill of Rights, had protected Americans against 

encroachments by the federal government. This 

afforded 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, 

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

adopted shortly afterward, declared that the “right of citizens 

of 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 scored 

major 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 on 

which Martin Luther King Jr. and others later would build the 

modern civil rights movement.

Black voters aligned with a small faction of southern 

whites 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 of 

Representatives. 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 Congress 

in 1870, Turner secured monthly pensions for black Civil War 

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 be 

permanently secured.

But the majority of southern whites were determined 

to resist black equality. Many could not unlearn the harsh 

stereotypes 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 in 

travel 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 the 

snow-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 flotilla 

of 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 “paramilitary 

organizations 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 the 

white-supremacy Democratic Party.

This was essentially what happened. In elections marred 

U.S. Representative Benjamin Sterling Turner was elected to Congress 

from Reconstruction-era Alabama. With the end of Reconstruction and the 

withdrawal of Union troops from the South, black Americans in that region 

were systematically deprived of their political rights.
FREE AT LAST: THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT 21

by fraud, intimidation, and violence, Democrats gradually 

regained 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 majority 

of 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 aspect 

of everyday life. They required separate public schools, 

railroad cars, and public libraries; separate water fountains, 

restaurants, and hotels. The system became known informally 

as “Jim Crow,” from the 1828 minstrel show song “Jump Jim 

Crow,” which was typically performed by white performers in 

blackface 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 of 

equal 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 in 

1896. 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 the 

law persuaded Homer Plessy, a public education advocate with 

a 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 of 

inferiority.” If black Americans disagreed, that was their own 

interpretation and not that of the statute. Thus did the high 

court 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, was 

that separate never really was equal. Public schools and other 

facilities 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 in 

words 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, new 

strategies 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 of 

achieving future African-American political gains.
22 FREE AT LAST: THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT

argued instead for focusing on black economic development. 

Others, including most prominently the leading scholar and 

intellectual 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 the 

opportunity to head a new school for African Americans in 

Macon County, Alabama.

Washington had concluded that practical skills and 

economic 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 such 

as carpentry and blacksmithing, females typically studied 

nursing or dressmaking. Tuskegee also trained schoolteachers 

to staff African-American schools throughout the South. This 

approach promised to develop economically productive black 

citizens without forcing the nation to confront squarely the 

civil 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

is that in the great leap from slavery to freedom we 

may overlook the fact that the masses of us are to live 

by the productions of our hands, and fail to keep in 

mind 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 is 

at 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 a 

vision in which blacks concentrated on acquiring real 

estate or industrial skill rather than political office, a 

vision that seemingly accepted the Jim Crow system. 

As Washington put it in his Atlanta address: “The 

opportunity to earn a dollar in a factory just now is 

worth more than the opportunity to spend a dollar in 

an opera-house.”

But close study of Washington’s speech suggests that 

he did not mean to accept permanent inequality. Instead, he 

called 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 has 

anything to contribute to the markets of the world is long in 

any 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 that 

the 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 to 

some 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 and 

social 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 and 

edited a number of scholarly studies depicting black life in 

America. Social science, he believed, would provide the key to 

improving race relations.

W.E.B. Du Bois, one of the United States’ leading 20th century figures, 

testifies before Congress in 1945.
FREE AT LAST: THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT 23

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 flimsiest 

of evidence) — took hold throughout the South, Du Bois 

gradually concluded that only direct political agitation and 

protest could advance African-American civil rights. Inevitably 

Du Bois came into dispute with Booker T. Washington, who 

quietly built political ties to national Republicans to secure 

a 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 accommodation 

and humility,” Black Folk declared squarely that “the problem 

of 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 and 

South, 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 our 

energies to righting these great wrongs.

Du Bois also disagreed with Washington’s exclusive 

emphasis on artisan skills. “The Negro race, like all races,” he 

argued 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 shall 

develop money-makers but not necessarily men; if we make 

technical 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 this 

foundation we may build bread winning, skill of hand, and 

quickness of brain, with never a fear lest the child and man 

mistake the means of living for the object of life.

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 of 

accommodation 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 the 

issues of civil rights and racial justice. But the movement was 

weakly organized and poorly funded. It disbanded in 1910. A new 

and stronger organization was ready to take its place by then.

A false charge that a black man had attempted to rape a 

white woman led to anti-black rioting in Springfield, Illinois, in 

August 1908. The riots left seven dead and forced thousands 

of African Americans to flee the city. The suffragette Mary 

White Ovington led a call for an organizational meeting of 

reformers. “The spirit of the abolitionists must be revived,” 

she later wrote. Her group soon expanded and linked up with 

Du Bois and other African-American activists. In 1910, they 

founded the National Association for the Advancement of 

Colored 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.
Marcus Garvey: 

Another Path

Marcus 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 and 

power in their own hands. To 

this end he formed, among 

other organizations, the 

United Negro Improvement 

Association (UNIA). 

After reading Booker T. 

Washington’s Up From 

Slavery, Garvey asked himself: 

“Where is the black man’s 

government? Where is his 

king and kingdom? Where 

is 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 to 

make them.”

Garvey was born in the 

parish 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 the 

youthful Marcus received 

early exposure to the world 

of letters. Migrating to 

Kingston, Garvey displayed 

highly refined talents as a 

typesetter and developed an 

interest in journalism. 

After being blacklisted 

for attempting to organize 

workers, he left Jamaica to 

visit Latin America, and 

he later spent two years in 

England. During these years, 

he studied informally at the 

University of London and 

worked for the SudaneseEgyptian black nationalist, 

Duse Mohammed Ali, 

founder of The African Times

and Orient Review.

Garvey was determined 

to spread his program of 

black 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, and 

others capable of thriving 

independently of the white 

economy. While these and 

other initial attempts to 

organize the masses met 

with little success, Garvey’s 

perseverance earned him 

increasing fame; by the end 

of the First World War, his 

name was widely known 

among black Americans.

Garvey was a master at 

manipulating the media 

and at staging dramatic 

public events. He founded 

his own newspaper, Negro 

World, which was distributed 

widely throughout the 

United States and in some 

Latin American countries. 

He held colorful annual 

conventions in New York 

City, where men and women 

marched under a banner 

of red, black, and green. 

This flag, along with other 

tricolored emblems, remains 

popular among African 

Americans to the present 

day. The striking military 

regalia sometimes worn by 

Garveyites demonstrated the 

nationalistic and militaristic 

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
image that his black 

nationalist movement strove 

to convey. 

There is a legend that 

once a Congolese leader in a 

remote African village was 

asked if he knew anything 

about the United States. His 

response was said to be, “I 

know the name of Marcus 

Garvey.”

Under the name of the 

Black Star Line, the UNIA 

launched an abortive attempt 

to open up the world to 

black-owned commerce. The 

organization sold impressive 

amounts of stock in this 

enterprise, mostly in small 

amounts to ordinary working 

people, and purchased several 

steamships, unfortunately in 

dilapidated condition. 

Garvey believed in 

separation of the races and 

was willing to cooperate 

with leaders of white racist 

organizations, notably the 

Ku Klux Klan. After meeting 

with Klan leadership, he came 

under attack from several 

already-hostile black leaders. 

A. Philip Randolph, founder 

and leader of the Brotherhood 

of Sleeping Car Porters, 

America’s earliest successful, 

predominantly black labor 

union, was particularly 

hostile. 

Randolph accused 

Garvey of cooperating with 

white racists in a scheme to 

repatriate American blacks 

back to Africa. Garvey 

denied any such ambitions, 

but he did send emissaries 

to the Republic of Liberia to 

investigate the prospects of 

new business undertakings, 

and he found considerable 

sympathy for his ideas among 

young African intellectuals.

In 1925, Garvey was 

imprisoned on federal 

charges of using the mails 

to defraud. He denied the 

charge, 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, the 

entertainer and political 

activist Paul Robeson, and 

the controversial spiritual 

figure Father Divine for their 

failure to supply effective 

race leadership. But Garvey 

was unable there either to 

rebuild his organization to 

its previous membership 

levels. He retained sufficient 

U.S. popularity to draw 

an attentive audience to a 

meeting in Windsor, Ontario, 

just across the river from 

Detroit, Michigan, a base 

for Garvey’s earlier activism. 

His final operations were 

conducted from London, 

England, where he died 

in 1940.

By Wilson Jeremiah Moses 

Moses is Ferree Professor of 

History 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.

Advertisement for a 1917 Marcus Garvey speech.

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

CharlesHamiltonHouston and

ThurgoodMarshall

Launch the Legal Challenge to Segregation

— 4 —

I

n November 1956, a black-instigated boycott of the 

segregated bus system in Montgomery, Alabama, 

had entered its 12th month. A year earlier, a black 

woman named Rosa Parks had bravely refused to 

relinquish 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 the 

bus that the city of Montgomery yielded and the boycott 

succeeded. As historian Kevin Mumford has written: 

“Without constitutional legitimacy and the promise of 

protection 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 that 

the 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 and 

his greatest student, Thurgood Marshall, who ensured that 

those protestors would have the United States’ most powerful 

force — 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 in 

other 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 the 

legal structure by which the American South had enforced its 

Jim Crow system of race segregation. 

Charles Hamilton Houston: 

The Man Who Killed Jim Crow

Charles Hamilton Houston was born in 1895 in Washington, 

D.C. A brilliant student, he graduated as a valedictorian from 

Amherst College at the age of 19, then served in a segregated 

U.S. Army unit during the First World War. After his brush 

with racism in the Army, Houston determined to make the 

fight for civil rights his life’s calling. Returning home, he 

studied 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 of 

civil 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 on 

society,” he argued. In 1924, Houston began teaching part 

time at Howard University Law School, the Washington, 

D.C. institution responsible by some accounts for training 

fully three-fourths of the African-American attorneys then 

practicing. By 1929, Houston headed the law school. 

In just six years, Houston radically improved the 

education of African-American law students, earned full 

accreditation for the school, and produced a group of lawyers 

trained in civil rights law. In the book Black Profiles, George R. 

The skilled litigator and legal educator Charles Hamilton Houston launched 

the legal assault on “Jim Crow” laws.
FREE AT LAST: THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT 27

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 practical 

workings 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 of 

young, mostly Howard-trained lawyers, among them James 

Nabrit, Spottswood Robinson III, A. Leon Higginbotham, 

Robert Carter, William Hastie, George E.C. Hayes, Jack 

Greenberg, 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 allocated 

to blacks were not equal to those afforded whites, Houston 

reasoned, segregationist states were not meeting even the 

Plessy standard. Separate but equal logically required those 

states 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, Murray 

v. 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 not 

an equal opportunity. Maryland’s law school was ordered to 

admit 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 of 

ill 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 and 

illuminated the path.

Thurgood Marshall (left) and Charles Hamilton Houston flank Donald Gaines Murray, plaintiff in 

a 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.
28 FREE AT LAST: THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT

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. Born 

in 1908 and educated in a segregated Baltimore, Maryland, 

secondary school, Marshall attended Lincoln University, “the 

first institution founded anywhere in the world to provide a 

higher 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 enrolled 

at Howard Law School, enduring the long commute from 

Baltimore to Washington, D.C. His mother pawned her 

wedding and engagement rings to pay the tuition. Marshall 

excelled at his studies, graduated first in his class of 1933, and 

earned the respect of Charles Hamilton Houston.

Working closely with Houston, Marshall prevailed 

in the Murray v. Pearson case described previously, then 

accepted 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 to 

detail, 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 most 

intransigent southern segregationist sheriff could not resist 

his stories and jokes.

Armed with this potent combination of likeability and 

skill, Thurgood Marshall in 1946 persuaded an all-white 

Southern jury to acquit 25 blacks of a rioting charge. On other 

occasions, 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 the 

legal 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:

• Smith v. Allwright (1944), a Supreme Court decision 

barring the whites-only primary elections in which political 

parties chose their general election candidates. According 

to his biographer, Juan Williams, Marshall considered the 

case his most important triumph: “The segregationists 

would [demand that (the candidates) support segregation to 

capture their party’s nomination], and by the time the blacks 

and Hispanics and ... even in some cases, the women, got 

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 movement 

of 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 the 

Supreme Court that state courts could not constitutionally 

prevent the sale of real property to blacks, even if that 

property was covered by a racially restrictive covenant. 

These covenants were a legal tactic commonly used to 

prevent 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 real 

achievement, 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 merits 

of segregated black and white schools. Only a direct ruling 

against segregation itself could at one stroke eliminate 

disparities like those in Clarendon County, South Carolina, 

where per pupil expenditures in 1949-1950 averaged $179 

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

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 her 

house, although there was a white school only seven blocks 

away. The Kansas state courts had rejected Brown’s claim by 

finding that the segregated black and white schools were of 

comparable quality. This gave Marshall the chance to urge 

that 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 scientific 

evidence. The NAACP Legal Defense Fund assembled a 

team 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.

Clockwise from top: President Dwight D. 

Eisenhower would use federal troops to ensure 

the enrollment of the first black students in the 

previously 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 sign 

from a Greensboro, North Carolina, bus, 1956.
30 FREE AT LAST: THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT

On May 17, 1954, a unanimous Supreme Court vindicated 

Marshall’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 the 

segregation complained of, deprived of the equal protection 

of 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 saying 

that something was wrong with how black Americans were 

being treated.... I remember my father, who was a teenager 

at the time, saying the decision made him feel like he was 

somebody.... On a personal level, Brown’s real legacy is that 

it 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 all 

deliberate 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 the 

decisions 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, relegated 

for 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 University 

of Alabama in 1963. But litigation worked slowly, and one case 

at a time.

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 most 

basic constitutional right. Through a combination of unfair 

technicalities, outright fraud and chicanery, and ultimately 

by 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 to 

overcome 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 was 

coalescing. 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 entitled 

as Americans. As they forced their countrymen to confront 

squarely the unconscionable realities of segregation and 

racial oppression, the balance of national sympathies — and 

of 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.
Even as African 

Americans fought for 

their civil rights, their 

individual accomplishments 

demonstrated the justice of 

their cause. The achievements 

of the Nobel Prize-winning 

scholar and international 

official Ralph Bunche 

demonstrated to all fairminded people that black 

Americans could contribute 

fully to American society.

Ralph Bunche was born 

in Detroit, Michigan, on 

August 7, 1903. His father 

was an itinerant barber, his 

mother a housewife and 

amateur pianist. His father 

abandoned the family, and his 

mother died when Bunche 

was 14 years old. From then 

on he lived in Los Angeles, 

California, with his maternal 

grandmother, whose wisdom 

and strength of character 

greatly influenced him. He 

graduated with honors from 

the University of California 

at Los Angeles and continued 

as a graduate student on 

scholarship at Harvard 

University.

From his earliest years, 

Bunche was acutely conscious 

of racial discrimination and 

was determined to work 

against it. His studies of 

colonial Africa persuaded 

him that colonialism had 

much in common with racial 

discrimination in the United 

States. He was determined to 

help put an end to both. 

Bunche set up the Political 

Science Department at 

Howard University, the 

historically 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 was 

the chief associate and cowriter of the Swedish social 

economist Gunnar Myrdal, 

whose landmark 1944 study 

of U.S. race relations, An 

American Dilemma, was 

cited approvingly by the U.S. 

Supreme Court in its Brown v. 

Board of Education decision.

As the Second World 

War loomed, Bunche 

was recruited by the U.S. 

government to advise on 

Africa, and then transferred 

to the State Department to 

work on the future United 

Nations charter. He was 

the first black official in the 

State Department. At the 

San Francisco Conference 

in 1945, he drafted two 

chapters of the charter, 

on non-self-governing 

territories (colonies) and 

on the trusteeship system. 

These chapters provided 

the basis for accelerating 

decolonization after 

the war. Bunche did as 

much as anyone to make 

decolonization a reality.

Ralph Johnson Bunche: 

Scholar and Statesman

Dr. Ralph J. Bunche, peacemaker, mediator, and U.S. diplomat, receives the 

1950 Nobel Prize for Peace.

FREE AT LAST: THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT 31
In the newly established 

United Nations, Bunche 

set up the trusteeship 

system. His achievements 

as a member of the 

U.N. Secretariat were 

extraordinary. As 

secretary of the 1947 U.N. 

Special Commission on 

Palestine, Bunche wrote 

the commission’s majority 

report on partition as well 

as the minority report on a 

federal state. The former was 

adopted by the U.N. General 

Assembly and remains the 

basic goal of peacemakers in 

the Middle East. 

In May 1948, the British 

left Palestine, a Jewish state 

was declared in that part 

of mandatory Palestine so 

designated by the General 

Assembly, and five Arab 

states invaded the new 

state of Israel. The U.N. 

Security Council appointed 

a mediator, Count Folke 

Bernadotte, with Bunche 

as his chief adviser. They 

established a truce in 

Palestine, and Bunche 

organized a group of U.N. 

military observers to 

supervise it, the beginning 

of U.N. peacekeeping 

operations. Bernadotte 

was assassinated by the 

Stern Gang (an armed, 

underground Zionist faction 

condemned by Bunche and 

by 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 were 

concluded between Israel 

and her four Arab neighbors, 

providing a formal basis for 

the cessation of hostilities. 

In 1950, Bunche won the 

Nobel Peace Prize for these 

achievements.

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 nationalization 

of the Suez Canal — Britain, 

France, and Israel invaded 

Egypt in an ill-advised 

adventure that shocked the 

world. To get the invaders 

out 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 this 

force with minimum delay. 

Ominous Soviet threats of 

intervention lent additional 

urgency. Working around the 

clock with the enthusiastic 

support of the United States 

and many other countries, 

Bunche assembled and 

deployed 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 the 

Congo 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 indispensable 

adviser of Hammarskjold’s 

successor, U Thant of Burma 

— so indispensable that U 

Thant’s entreaties prevented 

Bunche from retiring from 

the United Nations to 

immerse himself full time in 

the civil rights movement. 

Bunche died, from overwork 

and the effects of diabetes, on 

December 9, 1971.

Ralph Bunche cared 

passionately 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 old 

colonial world, and the 

United Nations itself are 

particularly 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 the 

author of Hammarskjöld, 

A Life in Peace and War, 

Ralph Bunche: An American 

Odyssey, and other historical 

studies.

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

the crowd, and the words 

of 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 black 

cats 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 United 

States, and for many the 

country still came in two 

shades — black and white. 

Some hearts, including many 

from the South, were long 

filled with hate simply over 

the color of a person’s skin. 

Black people, from their 

perspective, didn’t deserve 

equal civil rights with whites. 

And that had extended to the 

unofficial-but-understood 

idea among baseball officials 

and team owners since before 

the turn of the century that 

the major leagues were for 

white players only. Blacks 

would have to play on their 

own 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 symbol 

that transcended sports, a 

large first step on a lengthy 

path toward driving home 

the concept of equality. His 

teammate Branca explained 

how Robinson’s achievement 

transcended the baseball 

diamond:

I’ve often said that it 

changed baseball, but 

it also changed the 

country and eventually 

changed the world ... .. 

Jackie made it easier for 

Jackie Robinson: 

Breaking the Color Barrier

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

Top: After a Brooklyn victory over the New York Yankees in the first game of the 

1952 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.
Rosa Parks. He made it 

easier for Martin Luther 

King Jr. And he made 

it easier for any black 

leader who was going to 

strive for racial equality. 

It basically changed the 

attitude of the whole 

country as far as looking 

at blacks.

It happened on the team. 

We had southern guys 

who grew up in that set 

of mores who looked 

down on blacks. They 

[African Americans] had 

to ride in the back of the 

bus, 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, on 

January 31, 1919, Robinson 

grew up in Pasadena, 

California. He excelled at 

four sports while in college 

at the nearby University of 

California 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 military 

charges of insubordination. 

But he was acquitted 

and earned an honorable 

discharge. “He was a person 

of 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 the 

national pastime of baseball, 

not least because he believed 

that African-American 

players would give his club 

a competitive advantage. 

Rickey understood that his 

man would have to possess 

the fortitude and strength of 

character to withstand the 

inevitable racist taunts — and 

worse — of players and fans. 

Rickey scouted Robinson in 

1945, playing for Kansas City 

in the Negro leagues, and 

decided that he had found 

such a player, and such a man.

Robinson spent the next 

season with the Dodgers’ 

minor-league team in 

Montreal, and then was 

promoted to the Dodgers for 

the 1947 season. It wasn’t easy 

being a pioneer. Rickey made 

Robinson promise for three 

years not to respond to the 

insults that came at him from 

fans around the league and 

the opposing teams. Enduring 

pressure experienced by 

no player before or since, 

Robinson excelled on the 

field. 

In his first major-league 

season, at the age of 28, 

Robinson played first base 

and compiled a .297 batting 

average. He displayed a 

dynamic style by stealing 

a National League-leading 

29 bases, won the league’s 

Rookie of the Year award, and 

helped the team reach the 

World Series. It helped that 

other teams acknowledged 

that Robinson had given 

the Dodgers a real edge and 

began themselves signing 

and playing black players. His 

best season came in 1949: 

He played second base and 

batted .342 with 16 home 

runs, 124 runs batted in, and 

37 stolen bases, earning the 

league’s Most Valuable Player 

award.

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 Baseball 

Hall of Fame, the first black 

player so honored.

After his playing career 

ended, Robinson continued 

to help in the fight for racial 

equality, speaking up for civil 

rights and for the leading 

men and organizations 

in 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 and 

died, age 53. In those 53 years, 

Robinson impacted millions 

of lives. He shamed the bigot, 

inspired African Americans, 

and through his unflagging 

example of resilience and 

dignity moved Americans of 

all stripes toward acceptance 

of African-American civil 

rights.

“A life is not important,” 

Robinson himself said, 

“except in the impact it has on 

other 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.

34 FREE AT LAST: THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT
FREE AT LAST: THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT 35

— 5 —

“WeHaveaMovement”

The successful boycott of segregated buses 

in Montgomery, Alabama — which began 

with 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 in 

disciplined political action, and marked the emergence of 

Martin Luther King Jr. — the indispensable leader who 

inspired millions, held them to the high moral standard 

of 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 reality 

of Jim Crow — and shaped the political reality in which the 

landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 

1965 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 come 

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, a 

Tennessee institution that trained labor organizers and 

desegregation advocates. Parks thus knew of efforts to 

improve 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 a 

seamstress at a local department store. When she rode home 

from work that afternoon, she sat in the first row of the 

“colored section” of seats between the “white” and “black” 

Above: Dr. King outlines strategies for the 

boycott of Montgomery, Alabama, buses. 

Among his advisors is Rosa Parks, seated 

second 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.
36 FREE AT LAST: THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT

rows. When the white seats filled, the driver ordered Parks to 

give 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 had 

crossed 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 to 

Montgomery, the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. The newlyinstalled pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, King 

was just 26 years old but he had been born to leadership: 

His father, the Reverend Martin Luther King Sr., headed the 

influential 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 we 

have shown an amazing patience. We have sometimes given 

our white brothers the feeling that we liked the way we were 

being treated. But we come here tonight to be saved from 

that 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 — 10 

cents — 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 price 

for its segregationist ways.

It also made a national figure of King, whose powerful 

presence 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 one 

of 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 to 

nonviolent tactics earned respect for the movement and 

discredited the segregationists of Montgomery. When 

an 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:

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 

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 and 

bravery and King’s political leadership, but also an NAACPstyle legal effort. As the boycotters braved segregationist 

opposition, desegregationist attorneys cited the precedent of 

Brown v. Board of Education in their court challenge to the 

Montgomery bus ordinance. In November 1956, the Supreme 

Court of the United States rejected the city’s final appeal, and 

the 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 the 

Southern 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 impatient 

with 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 freshman 

at the all-black North Carolina Agricultural and Technical 

College 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 

A Montgomery, Alabama, sit-in, 1961. Merely by sitting quietly at segregated 

lunch counters, civil rights activists risked arrest ... and much worse.
FREE AT LAST: THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT 37

an hour later. The next morning, 20 Negro students took 

lunch-counter seats in groups of three or four. “There was 

no 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, labor 

organizations and the northern-based Congress of Racial 

Equality (CORE) had employed sit-ins as well. As events in 

Greensboro 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. Back 

in 1955, King had reached out to the Reverend James Lawson, 

a civil rights activist and missionary who had served in 

India 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 to 

train a new generation of nonviolent activists. His 

students included Diane Nash, James Bevel, and John 

Lewis, today a U.S. representative from Georgia. All 

soon would assume prominence in the civil rights 

movement. At these training seminars, they agreed to 

stage 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 and 

moved deliberately. But when the Greensboro sit-in 

began 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 to 

nonviolence they would offer the world:

Don’t strike back or curse back if abused. ... Don’t block 

entrances to the stores and aisles.

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 each 

of you.

Typically a lunch counter would close when a sit-in 

began, 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 to 

serve jail time rather than pay a fine.

Nashville was an early example of how Jim Crow 

could not survive exposure. The legendary journalist David 

Halberstam 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 the 

country, and soon Americans across the nation were stunned 

by 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 another 

white man. Police, standing near by, made no arrest.”

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 model 

for the famous 1963 march.
38 FREE AT LAST: THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT

On April 19 of that year, a bomb exploded at the home 

of 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 no 

further incidents, and soon thereafter Nashville became the 

first southern city successfully to begin desegregating its 

public facilities.

Freedom Rides

Some of the young Nashville sit-in leaders joined up with the 

Student 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 the 

national government to regulate commerce that crosses 

state lines.) In the 1960 Boynton v. Virginia decision, the 

Court expanded its ruling to include bus terminals and other 

facilities associated with interstate travel. But possessing a 

right 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 the 

front 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. “If 

there is arrest, we will accept that arrest,” Farmer said. “And 

if 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. When 

the 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 with 

the 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, and 

one threw a fire bomb through a bus window. As the historian 

Raymond Arsenault writes: “The Freedom Riders had been 

all but doomed until an exploding fuel tank convinced the 

mob 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., to 

Florida 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 the 

bus terminal in Jackson, Mississippi.
FREE AT LAST: THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT 39

The second group of Freedom Riders shared their 

Trailways bus with a group of Klansmen who boarded at 

Atlanta. When the black Freedom Riders refused to sit at the 

back 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, the 

toughs 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 to 

restrain 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 bunch 

of rabble-rousers.” A member of Alabama’s congressional 

delegation, Representative George Huddleston Jr., deemed the 

Freedom 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 political 

consequences. “If the Freedom Ride had been stopped as a 

result of violence,” she later said, “I strongly felt that the future 

of the movement was going to be just cut short because 

the impression would have been given 

that 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 from 

the 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 was 

met by a mob estimated at 1,000 “within 

an instant” of pulling into the station, 

the Associated Press reported. Among 

the injured were John Seigenthaler, an 

assistant 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 then 

filling 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 the 

Interstate Commerce Commission to adopt stiff regulations 

to enforce the integration of interstate transportation. The 

agency did so. With this sustained federal effort, Jim Crow 

faltered in bus terminals, on buses, and on trains, at least those 

that 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 to 

take a cold, hard look at the reality of racial oppression. The 

Birmingham mob beat Tommy Langston, a photographer for 

the 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 the 

justice of their cause. The Reverend Billy Graham called for 

prosecution of their attackers and declared it “deplorable 

when certain people in any society have been treated as 

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

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: Raymond 

Arsenault writes that while the Greyhound 

bus burned outside Anniston, “one little girl, 

12-year-old Janie Miller, supplied the choking 

victims with water, filling and refilling a 

five-gallon [19-liter] bucket while braving the 

insults 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 segregated 

city of Albany, Georgia, had traditionally 

engaged 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 home 

base 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 realized 

that 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 star 

and 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 

the peace. When the court offered King and Abernathy their 

choice 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 the 

chief was quick to seize the initiative: “Did you see them 

nonviolent rocks?” he asked.

King moved swiftly to limit the damage. He cancelled a 

planned 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 no 

longer help the wider movement. SNCC, NAACP, CORE, and 

other 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:

Montgomery, Alabama: about 70 clergymen of different creeds and 

denominations being arrested after holding an anti-segregation prayer vigil 

in front of city hall, August 1962.
FREE AT LAST: THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT 41

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 to 

make 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 political 

savvy 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 — a 

podgy, 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; a 

recent 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 system 

of segregation. We decided, therefore, to center the 

Birmingham struggle on the business community, for we 

knew 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 followed 

on 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 loss 

of 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 of 

arrests 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 not 

order 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 they 

would 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 to 

evade 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 United 

States and our desire to purify the judicial system of 

the state of Alabama, we risk this critical move with an 

awareness of the possible consequences involved.

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 white 

clergyman 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.”

Albany, Georgia: African-American demonstrators kneel in prayer during a 

December 1961 hearing for Freedom Riders arrested there.
42 FREE AT LAST: THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT

Letter From Birmingham Jail

As King languished in his jail cell, he produced one of the 

most 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,” and 

they opposed King’s civil disobedience “however technically 

peaceful 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 held 

a powerful condemnation of inaction in the face of injustice, 

and they displayed an extraordinary faith that in America the 

cause 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 a 

threat 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 for 

the tension: “There is a type of constructive, nonviolent 

tension which is necessary for growth.” For those who do not 

themselves 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: “I 

have no fear about the outcome of our struggle. ... We will 

reach 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.”

“We Have a Movement”

Because the Birmingham campaign required their leadership, 

Martin Luther King Jr. and Ralph Abernathy posted bond 

after 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 and 

nonviolent 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 a 

better education in five days in jail than in five months in a 

segregated school.” In his Autobiography, King related the case 

of a black teenager who decided to march in the face of his 

father’s objections:

“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 will 

sneak 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 come 

before 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 well 

beyond its capacity. Perhaps most importantly, they stretched 

Bull Connor’s temper to its breaking point.

On May 3, Connor determined to halt the 

demonstrations by force. Fire hoses set to full pressure — 

enough to peel bark from a tree — knocked protestors off their 

feet 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 some 

police brutality.’ ” Foreman thought this “very cold, cruel, 

and calculating,” but, as the historian C. Vann Woodward 
FREE AT LAST: THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT 43

concluded: “The more seasoned campaigners had learned the 

price 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 United 

States and in much of the world. Faced with the greatest 

provocation, most demonstrators remained nonviolent. James 

Bevel roamed the streets, shouting through a bullhorn: “If 

you’re not going to demonstrate in a nonviolent way, then 

leave.” By May 6, Bull Connor was housing thousands of child 

prisoners at the state fairgrounds.

A New York Times editorial expressed the feeling of 

growing 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 white 

demonstrators 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 of 

a dog swirling at the youth’s midsection happened to pass 

under the eyes of the president in the Oval Office, and he 

told 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. Arriving 

a 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 be 

freed, and charges dropped. Bull Connor called it “the worst 

day of my life.”

The triumph of the Birmingham movement reflected the 

bravery 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 television 

screens — 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 to 

go 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 your 

freedom. The Constitution says we’re all equal, but Negroes 

aren’t equal.

Judge: But you people have made great gains and they still 

are. It takes time.

Boy: We’ve been waiting over 100 years.

The March on Washington

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 scored 

real gains, each advance came over dogged opposition. 

Federal troops were needed to ensure the admission of 

James Meredith, the first black to study at the University of 

Mississippi, 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 the 

intervention of federal marshals ensured the enrollment of 

African 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 

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

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, the 

unofficial 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 legislation 

prohibiting 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 civil 

rights 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 order 

desegregating 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 Advancement 

of 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: the 

Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C.

The “March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom” would 

be the largest political demonstration the nation had ever 

seen. Chartered buses and trains carried participants from 

throughout the nation. A quarter-million Americans, and by 

some estimates even more, gathered that day, among them at 

least 50,000 whites. On the podium stood a stellar assemblage 

of 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 the 

Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, and Abraham 

Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. King organized his remarks in 

the style and structure of a sermon, the kind he had delivered 

at 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 “a 

joyous 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 were 

signing a promissory note to which every American was to 

fall 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 that 

promissory 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 to 

right: John Lewis, Whitney Young, A. Philip Randolph, Martin Luther King Jr., 

James Farmer, and Roy Wilkins.
FREE AT LAST: THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT 45

cash this check, a check that will give us upon demand the 

riches 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 that

in the process of gaining our rightful place, we must not 

be guilty of wrongful deeds. Let us not seek to satisfy our 

thirst for freedom by drinking from the cup of bitterness 

and hatred. We must forever conduct our struggle on the 

high plane of dignity and discipline. We must not allow our 

creative protest to degenerate into physical violence.

Some believe that King spoke extemporaneously as he 

delivered 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 and 

tomorrow, 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, the 

sons 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 with 

the 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 across 

the nation and around the world, momentum for real change 

accelerated. But there were battles still to be fought, and 

victory, while ever closer, still lay in the distance.

“I have a dream today!” Martin Luther King addresses the largest political 

demonstration the nation had ever seen. For many, his speech in 1963 

was the finest ever delivered by an American.
46 FREE AT LAST: THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT

Rosa McCauley Parks 

is known today as the 

“mother of the civil 

rights movement” because 

her arrest for refusing to 

give 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 a 

seamstress to board a bus on 

the afternoon of December 1, 

1955. She was tired, and she 

just 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 bring 

herself to do it.

“I didn’t get on the bus 

with the intention of being 

arrested,” she said later. “I got 

on the bus with the intention 

of going home.”

While she did not know 

her act would set in motion 

a 381-day bus boycott, she 

knew one thing. Her own 

personal bus boycott began 

that day. 

“I knew that as far as I was 

concerned, I would never ride 

on a segregated bus again.” 

The arrest and brief jailing 

of Rosa Parks, a woman 

highly respected in the black 

community, and the boycott 

that followed led to a U.S. 

Supreme Court decision 

outlawing segregation on 

city buses. The boycott also 

raised to national prominence 

a youthful, little-known 

minister named Martin 

Luther King Jr. Under his 

leadership, the boycott set a 

Rosa Parks: 

Mother of the Civil Rights Movement

Above: Rosa Parks seated at the front of 

the bus, after the Supreme Court of the 

United States ruled unconstitutional the 

segregated seating that had prevailed on 

the Montgomery, Alabama, bus system. 

Parks’s December 1955 refusal to give 

up her seat to a white man sparked the 

Montgomery Bus Boycott and launched the 

civil 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 protest 

that became a successful 

strategy in the civil rights 

movement.

There were many forces 

in Rosa Parks’s early life 

that 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 the 

African Methodist Episcopal 

Church had for generations 

been a strong advocate for 

black equality.

She also was strongly 

influenced by her 

grandparents, especially her 

grandfather. He responded 

to the family’s fears of the 

violent, racist, secret society 

known as the Ku Klux 

Klan by keeping a loaded 

double-barreled shotgun 

nearby. While the very real 

possibility of Klan violence 

never materialized for 

her 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 and 

an all-white teaching staff. 

At the school, Parks learned 

“to believe we could do what 

we wanted in life.” She also 

learned from the teachers 

that not all white people 

were bigots.

It was there she met 

Johnnie Carr, and the two 

girls started a friendship that 

would last a lifetime. Carr 

said of her friend’s childhood: 

“I was noisy and talkative, 

but she was very quiet, and 

always stayed out of trouble. 

But whatever she did, she 

always put herself completely 

into it. But she was so quiet 

you would never have 

believed she would get to the 

point of being arrested.”

Parks wanted to be a 

teacher, but had to drop 

out 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 part 

of the Second World War, 

she worked at the racially 

desegregated Maxwell Field 

(now Maxwell Air Force 

Base) in Montgomery. 

She later attributed her 

indignation toward the 

segregated Montgomery 

transportation system to the 

contrast 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 

to support his efforts. The 

following year, Parks moved 

north, to Detroit, Michigan, 

where she worked for 

Congressmen John Conyers, 

who often joked that he had 

more people visit his office to 

meet his staff assistant than 

to meet him. 

Parks was inducted into 

the National Women’s Hall 

of Fame in 1993. She was 

presented the Medal of 

Freedom Award by President 

Bill Clinton in 1996 and 

the Congressional Gold 

Medal in 1999. The Southern 

Christian Leadership Council 

established an annual Rosa 

Parks Freedom Award. 

After her death on 

October 24, 2005, Congress 

approved a resolution 

allowing her body to lie in 

honor in the rotunda of the 

U.S. Capitol. She was the 31st 

person, the first woman, and 

only the second black person 

to be accorded that honor 

since the practice began 

in 1852.

Rosa Parks was always 

modest about her role in the 

civil rights movement, giving 

credit to a higher power for 

her decision not to give up 

her seat. “I was fortunate 

God provided me with the 

strength I needed at the 

precise time conditions were 

ripe for change. I am thankful 

to him every day that he gave 

me the strength not to move.” 

By Kenneth M. Hare

The Editorial Page Director at 

The Montgomery (Alabama) 

Advertiser, Hare is also the 

author of They Walked to 

Freedom 1955–1956: The 

Story of the Montgomery Bus 

Boycott.

Rosa Parks, age 84, 

displays a program from the 

dedication of the Rosa Parks 

Elementary School in San 

Francisco, California.

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

Death in Mississippi

The murders of civil 

rights workers James 

Chaney, Andrew 

Goodman, and Michael 

Schwerner by a conspiracy of 

police and Ku Klux Klansmen 

in Mississippi on June 21, 

1964, was one of the pivotal 

events of the civil rights 

movement. Because two 

of the victims were white 

— and their disappearance 

baffled investigators for 

almost the entire summer 

of 1964 — the case became 

a national preoccupation, 

bringing the Federal Bureau 

of Investigation (FBI) and 

world press attention to tiny 

Philadelphia, Mississippi, the 

town 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 distrustful 

attitude toward outsiders 

or anyone who threatened 

“the southern way of life,” 

meaning segregation and the 

denial of many basic rights 

to black people. As early as 

1961, civil rights workers 

had targeted Mississippi 

for efforts to encourage 

expanded voting rights, for 

in its repressive environment, 

few blacks were allowed to 

vote. The voter registration 

work was difficult, however, 

with volunteers frequently 

being beaten and arrested.

Fearing that the rest of the 

United States did not fully 

understand the importance 

of these events, the civil 

rights movement hatched a 

plan to create the Mississippi 

Summer Project, later known 

as Freedom Summer, in 

which 1,000 northern college 

students, mostly white, 

would flood the state to 

help with voter registration 

and, by their presence, make 

Mississippi’s situation better 

known. At the prospect 

of such an “invasion,” 

local resistance stiffened; 

belligerent state leaders 

vowed opposition, and the Ku 

Klux Klan, a white vigilante 

group that historically had 

employed violence and 

intimidation to enforce 

regional racial customs, was 

revived.

On the very first day of 

Freedom 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; and 

Schwerner, a social worker 

from New York’s Lower East 

Side who at 24 was already 

a veteran activist — drove 

to the remote black hamlet 

of Longdale to investigate a 

recent Klan assault. They had 

visited previously in the hope 

of opening a class to teach 

blacks how to register to vote.

After meeting with their 

contacts there and viewing 

the charred remains of a 

church the Klan had set on 

fire, the young men were 

heading west toward the 

county seat of Philadelphia 

when Deputy Sheriff Cecil 

Ray Price stopped them for 

speeding. He placed them 

under arrest and escorted 

them to the Neshoba County 

jail. The civil rights workers, 

while naturally suspicious 

of the local police, did not 

resist. Like everyone in their 

movement, they believed in 

the power of nonviolence and 

nonconfrontation to attain 

the goal of racial equality. 

A 44-day FBI search in Mississippi discovered the bodies of the murdered 

civil rights workers Andrew Goodman, James Early Chaney, and Michael 

Henry Schwerner.

48 FREE AT LAST: THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT
They had no way of knowing 

that Price was part of a Klan 

conspiracy to hold them 

in jail until a mob could be 

assembled.

Later that night the deputy 

released the three boys, who 

immediately returned to 

their car and began driving 

toward Meridian, where 

they were based, about a 

half hour’s drive south. Out 

on the dark rural highway, 

however, a Klan posse of 

vehicles, including that of 

Deputy Price, chased down 

the civil rights workers. 

Removing them to a secluded 

area nearby, the Klansmen 

pulled their victims from the 

car, shot and killed them, and 

secreted their bodies in an 

earthen dam being built on a 

neighborhood dairy farm.

A 44-day search ensued, 

as FBI agents dispatched by 

President Lyndon Johnson 

scoured the state. All summer 

long the world read reports of 

the mystery, while Mississippi 

officials refused to even 

investigate the case, insisting 

that the disappearance of 

the men was likely a hoax. 

When, on August 4, the FBI 

finally located the dead civil 

rights workers, a national 

outcry demanded that those 

responsible for so heinous 

a crime be caught and 

punished.

In the U.S. justice system, 

murders are normally 

prosecuted under state law, 

in the courts of the state 

where the crime took place. 

When Mississippi declined 

to press murder charges, the 

federal government sought 

alternatives. Beginning in the 

1940s, Washington had tried 

unsuccessfully to prosecute 

southern lynch mobs under 

old Reconstruction-era civil 

rights laws. It had never done 

so successfully, but the Justice 

Department resolved to try 

again. In early December 

1964, the FBI arrested 21 men 

in the case — local Klansmen 

and several police officers, 

among them the Neshoba 

County sheriff and his deputy 

— and charged them with 

conspiracy to violate the 

three activists’ civil rights. 

Prosecutors were forced to 

go all the way to the U.S. 

Supreme Court to have the 

laws clarified and validated 

for use in this case. But in 

1967, in a landmark verdict, a 

federal 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 Schwerner 

proved a tipping point in 

overcoming the dogged 

resistance of “Fortress 

Mississippi.” While 

some civil rights workers 

complained that it had taken 

the deaths of white men 

finally to bring national 

scrutiny on Mississippi, the 

powerful national reaction 

helped topple the state’s 

particularly vicious forms 

of racial discrimination 

once and for all. Today, 

black Mississippians vote 

in large numbers, sit in the 

state legislature, and have 

represented their state in the 

U.S. Congress.

In the decades after 1964, 

many Mississippians grew 

ashamed of their state’s 

conduct during the civil 

rights era, and there were 

calls for the state to come to 

terms 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 organizer 

of 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 a 

partial resolution of a crime 

that had long haunted the 

nation. 

By Philip Dray

The author of Capitol 

Men: The Epic Story of 

Reconstruction Through 

the 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, and 

the Civil Rights Campaign for 

Mississippi.

In 2005, 41 years after the deaths of Goodman, Chaney, and Schwerner, 

Edgar Ray Killen was convicted of the murders.

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

Martyr of the Mississippi Movement

Medgar Evers, head 

of the National 

Association 

for the Advancement of 

Colored 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 galvanized 

further 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 accomplished 

student and athlete. There he 

met his future wife, Myrlie; 

the couple was married 

in 1951.

Evers became a protégé 

of T.R.M. Howard, a black 

physician and businessman 

who founded both an 

insurance agency and 

a medical clinic in the 

Mississippi Delta. Howard 

also established the 

Mississippi Regional Council 

of Negro Leadership, a civil 

rights organization that 

employed a “top-down” 

approach, encouraging 

leading African-American 

professionals and clergy to 

promote self-help, business 

ownership, and, ultimately, 

the demand for civil rights 

among the broader black 

population. 

Evers determined to see 

the freedoms he had fought 

for overseas established at 

home. He soon emerged 

as one of the Mississippi 

Regional Council’s most 

effective activists. Like his 

mentor, he mixed business 

with civil rights campaigning, 

working as a salesman for 

Howard’s Magnolia Mutual 

Life 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.)

In 1954, Evers challenged 

the segregationist order by 

applying for enrollment 

at the law school of the 

all-white University of 

Mississippi, known as “Ole 

Miss.” Evers was turned away, 

but his effort won him the 

admiration of the NAACP’s 

Legal Defense Fund, and he 

was subsequently named 

the organization’s first field 

secretary 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 do 

it someday. There are lakes 

where a man can sink a hook 

and fight a bass. There is 

room here for my children to 

play and grow and become 

good citizens — if the white 

man will let them.”

At the time, however, 

whites’ cooperation appeared 

very much in doubt. Two 

of the United States’ most 

infamous 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 of 

the defendants’ guilt, an allwhite male jury took only 

67 minutes to acquit them. 

One juror later asserted that 

the panel took a “soda break” 

to stretch deliberations 

beyond one hour, “to make 

it look good.” (In May 2004, 

the Justice Department, 

calling the 1955 prosecution 

a “grotesque miscarriage of 

justice,” reopened the murder 

investigation. But with many 

potential witnesses long dead 

and evidence scattered, a 

grand 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 to 

desegregate the nation’s public 

schools. Local white groups 

known as Citizens Councils 

vowed to resist integration 

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

50 FREE AT LAST: THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT
at any cost. Evers, who had 

earlier been denied admission 

to Ole Miss, assisted other 

blacks’ efforts to enroll there. 

In 1962, Air Force veteran 

James Meredith was admitted 

to the school by a direct order 

from U.S. Supreme Court 

Justice Hugo Black. State 

officials resisted the order, 

and Meredith managed to 

begin classes only after a 

night of rioting in which 

two people were killed and 

hundreds injured.

As his efforts on 

Meredith’s behalf intensified 

the segregationist hatred of 

Evers, he launched a series of 

boycotts, sit-ins, and protests 

in Jackson, Mississippi’s 

largest city. Even the NAACP 

was occasionally concerned 

with the extent of Evers’s 

efforts. When Martin Luther 

King Jr. led a high-profile 

civil rights campaign in 

Birmingham, Alabama, in the 

spring of 1963, Evers stepped 

up his Jackson Movement 

— demanding the hiring of 

black police, the creation of 

a biracial committee, the 

desegregation of downtown 

lunch counters, and the 

use of courtesy titles (Mr., 

Mrs., Miss) by whites who 

dealt with black shoppers in 

downtown stores. 

The city’s reaction was 

ominous. Workmen erected 

on the nearby Mississippi 

State Fairgrounds a series 

of fenced stockades capable 

of holding thousands of 

protestors — 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 and 

store boycotts, marching and 

joining picket lines. These 

demonstrations represented 

a culmination of Evers’s long 

years of civil rights work. A 

high point came when Evers 

appeared on local television 

to explain the movement’s 

objectives. Whites were not 

accustomed to seeing black 

people on TV, especially 

presenting their case in their 

own words, and many were 

outraged.

Soon, attempts were made 

on Evers’s life: A bomb was 

thrown into his carport, a 

vehicle nearly ran him over. 

As Evers returned home on 

the night of June 12, 1963, he 

was ambushed and shot as he 

got out of his car. He died at 

his own front door. 

The murder of so popular 

a leader enraged the black 

community. Over several 

days there were numerous 

confrontations with police in 

downtown Jackson. Even the 

whites who ran the city were 

shocked by Evers’s death, for 

although he was an agitator, 

he was at least a familiar 

presence. The city fathers 

made the unusual concession 

of allowing a silent march 

to honor him, as civil rights 

leaders from across the nation 

arrived to pay tribute. He was 

buried at Arlington National 

Cemetery in Washington, 

D.C., with full military 

honors. Medgar’s brother 

Charles assumed some of 

his 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 fate 

to 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 of 

an 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 and 

intolerance, was Beckwith 

convicted and sentenced to 

life in prison, where he died 

in 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 a 

million. By 2006, Mississippi 

had the highest number of 

black elected officials in the 

country, including a quarter 

of its delegation in the U.S. 

House of Representatives and 

some 27 percent of its state 

legislature.

By Philip Dray

The author of Capitol 

Men: The Epic Story of 

Reconstruction Through 

the 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, and 

the Civil Rights Campaign for 

Mississippi.

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.

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

— 6 —

“ItCannotContinue”

Establishing Legal Equality

The civil rights movement led by Martin 

Luther King Jr. and others was the 

indispensable 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 of 

American politics, including the unexpected elevation 

of a powerful, pro-civil-rights southern president who 

helped overcome the forces that had defeated earlier 

civil rights legislation. Above all, support for these 

laws came from the growing political constituency for 

change — the millions of Americans horrified by the 

actions 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 

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.
FREE AT LAST: THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT 53

Jim Crow: the political party system and the rules of the 

U.S. Congress. When the United States acquired vast and 

potentially 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, and 

later Republicans, favored the North, opposed the extension of 

slavery into the newly acquired territories, and often believed 

that complete abolition was only a matter of time. Whigs and 

Republicans 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 specifically 

granted 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 we 

have seen, the post-war Radical Republicans pressed for 

a Reconstruction that would ensure African-American 

rights. After Reconstruction, the “Party of Lincoln” — the 

Republicans — continued to enjoy the support of most blacks. 

The Democratic Party, meanwhile, evolved into an alliance 

of southern segregationists and northern urban residents, 

often immigrants and industrial workers. As the 20th century 

progressed, the party’s northern wing became more politically 

liberal, and, with President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal 

economic policies, more accepting of broad federal powers. 

Liberal northern Democrats often chafed against southern 

racism, 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 bill 

required only a simple majority, any senator could block 

a 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 bill 

that enjoyed majority support and would have prevented 

workplace discrimination. In 1957, Senator Strom Thurmond 

(then a Democratic senator from South Carolina) filibustered 

for 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 shifting 

in 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 northern 

cities. 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 an 

increasingly attractive target for ambitious politicians.

In 1960, the Democratic candidate for president, Senator 

John F. Kennedy, was determined to increase his share of the 

historically 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, King 

acknowledged 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 he 

prevailed 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 as 

civil 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 events 

in Birmingham. With Kennedy’s assassination in November 

1963, responsibility for that legislation would fall to his vice 

president and successor, Lyndon Johnson.

Lyndon Baines Johnson

The new president possessed two enormous assets: a 

singularly powerful personality and a mastery of the 

procedures 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 a 

White House fellow under Johnson, recalled Johnson’s ability 
54 FREE AT LAST: THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT

to focus all his energies on extracting a needed vote from 

a recalcitrant senator. She called it “The Treatment.” King 

biographer Marshall Frady described it as

... a ferocious manner of persuasion that proceeded by 

a 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 a 

forefinger into his shirt. Johnson would lower his face closer 

and closer to his subject’s in escalating exhortation until the 

man 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 and 

then senator from a southern state, electoral realities obliged 

Johnson to mute some of his progressive views on civil 

rights and racial equality. But elevated unexpectedly to the 

presidency, Johnson placed the full measure of his political 

skills 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 it 

is, 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 the 

obvious 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 Education

and the many others won by Thurgood Marshall and the 

National Association for the Advancement of Colored People 

finally established that government, even state governments 

in the Deep South, could not discriminate against African 

Americans or anyone else. Civil rights activists like the 

Freedom 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 civil 

rights movement was obliged to wage battles one city and 

one business at a time. While Rosa Parks’s brave refusal to 

move to the back of the bus led to the desegregation of public 

transportation in Montgomery, Alabama, hundreds or even 

thousands 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 and 

may 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 “to 

regulate Commerce ... among the several States.” By the mid20th century, nearly every economic transaction involved some 

form 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 the 

inevitable filibuster by southern Democrats.

Johnson, in his first State of the Union Address on 

January 8, 1964, urged Congress to “let this session ... be 

known as the session which did more for civil rights than the 

last hundred sessions combined.” The months that followed 

saw intense congressional fact-finding and debate over the 

act. The House of Representatives held more than 70 days of 

public hearings, during which some 275 witnesses offered 

nearly 6,000 pages of testimony. At the end of this process, the 

House passed the bill by a vote of 290 to 130.

The Senate filibuster would last for 57 days, during which 

time 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 a 

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

its version of the civil rights bill. On July 2, 1964, the House 

of Representatives agreed to the Senate version, sending the 

bill 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 a 

nation of widening opportunities. Now our generation of 

Americans 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 of 

liberty. Yet millions are being deprived of those blessings 

— not because of their own failures, but because of the color 

of 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.

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, and 

for 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 the 

classrooms, 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 for 

wise and understanding hearts. Let us lay aside irrelevant 

differences and make our nation whole. Let us hasten that 

day when our unmeasured strength and our unbounded 

spirit will be free.

“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).
56 FREE AT LAST: THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT

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 the 

basis of sex) discrimination.

This authority is spelled out in broad provisions, called 

“titles.” The major points include:

• Title I, which abolished unequal application of voter 

registration requirements. 

• Title II, which prohibited discrimination in public 

accommodations. The title authorized individuals to file 

lawsuits to obtain injunctive relief (a court order ordering 

someone to do or not to do something) and allowed the 

attorney general of the United States to intervene in those 

lawsuits he deemed “of general public importance.”

• Title III, which authorized the U.S. attorney general to 

file 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 to 

maintain such a suit.

• 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 the 

decade since Brown v. Board of Education. 

• Title VI, which extended the act’s provisions to “any 

program 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 established 

the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission to 

review 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 the 

permanence 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 

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 order 

enjoining 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. 
FREE AT LAST: THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT 57

speaking, African Americans in the South had not enjoyed 

since the failure of Reconstruction.

Looking back, after the withdrawal of northern armies 

from the South in 1877, white southern elites re-imposed their 

political dominance. Suppressing the African-American vote 

was crucial to this objective and was achieved by a number 

of 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 right 

to vote in an election for federal office for failure to pay a poll 

tax. A Supreme Court decision two years later extended this 

prohibition 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 an 

applicant to take the examination unless an already-registered 

voter would vouch for him or her. It was nearly impossible for 

many black applicants even to take the test, since there were 

very 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 was 

often blatantly unfair. It might require an applicant to write 

out 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, for 

instance, 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 of 

registrars “qualified” each and every white applicant and not a 

single black.

Whatever tactic was employed, the threat of violence 

always lurked in the background. Election officials might 

publish in local newspapers the names of black voter 

applicants. This alerted local white Citizens Councils and 

Ku 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 and 

the 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. As 

an early volunteer, the plantation worker Fannie Lou Hamer, 

memorably explained: “I guess if I’d had any sense, I’d have 

been 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, the 

volunteers achieved this goal in a tragic manner. Three civil 

rights 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 brave 

volunteers persuaded some 17,000 equally brave African 

Americans to complete voter registration applications, 

election officials ultimately accepted less than 10 percent 

of 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 a 

registration 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 to 

vote. 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 and 

local 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 no 

word to be had,” came the reply.

The suppression of the march, the New York Times

reported, “was swift and thorough.” The paper described a 

flying wedge of troopers and recounted how “the first 10 or 

20 Negroes were swept to the ground screaming, arms and 
58 FREE AT LAST: THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT

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 the 

retreating 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 be 

known 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 our 

peaceful, 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 

Marchers cross the Edmund Pettis bridge over the Alabama River, March 21, 

1965, the beginning of the third Selma-to-Montgomery march. 

“Bloody Sunday,” Selma, Alabama, March 7, 1965. The suppression of the 

first Selma-to-Montgomery civil rights march was swift and thorough. 

“I thought I saw death,” said future U.S. Representative John Lewis.
FREE AT LAST: THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT 59

younger activists, many affiliated with SNCC, wanted to 

move 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 by 

hundreds of white religious leaders — on the second 

Selma-to-Montgomery march. Troopers again met them 

at the Pettus Bridge. The marchers stopped, then sang the 

movement’s anthem: “We Shall Overcome.” The group then 

prayed, and Abernathy thanked God for the marchers who 

“came to present their bodies as a living sacrifice.” King then 

directed 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 great 

pressure on an already sympathetic President Johnson. 

Too many Americans at long last had seen enough. From 

religious 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 that 

would become the Voting Rights Act. Addressing the nation 

that night, President Johnson employed the plainest of 

language in the service of a basic American value — the right 

to 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 that 

problem.

The Constitution says that no person shall be kept from 

voting because of his race or his color. We have all sworn an 

oath 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 the 

Constitution 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 States 

rights or National rights. There is only the struggle for 

human 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 the 

full blessings of American life.

Their cause must be our cause too, because it is not just 

Negroes but really it is all of us who must overcome the 

crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice. And we shall 

overcome.

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 not 

interfere and indeed take affirmative measures to protect the 

activists. “The law is clear,” the judge wrote, “that the right to 

petition one’s government for the redress of grievances may be 

exercised in large groups ... and these rights may be exercised 

by marching, even along public highways.”

The Selma-to-Montgomery March

By March 21, thousands of Americans from all walks of 

life began to assemble in Selma for the third Selma-toMontgomery march. The marchers planned to cover the 

entire 87-kilometer route over the course of five days and four 

nights, with marchers sleeping under the stars. The route they 

followed is today a National Historic Trail.

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

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

With the support of the Johnson administration and 

an 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 and 

gassings 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 over 

now. 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 and 

bearded representatives of the student left, movie stars and 

infants in strollers. There were two blind people and a man 

with 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 first 

day, then pitched two large circus tents and slept in sleeping 

bags and blankets. The next morning King announced: “I am 

happy to say that I have slept in a sleeping bag for the first time 

in my life. I feel fine.” By the second day, though, blisters and 

sunburn 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 fair 

number of “extras” chose to tag along, even during the third 

day, 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-scheduled 

address in Cleveland, Ohio. There King made explicit his 

debt to Mahatma Gandhi, whose famous march to the 

sea anticipated the Selma-to-Montgomery trek. “We are 

challenged to make the world one in terms of brotherhood,” 

King said. “We must learn to live together as brothers, or we 

will all perish as fools.”

As the marchers approached Montgomery, the crowd 

swelled to 25,000 or more. They came by chartered plane, by 

bus, 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 civil 

rights 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 the 

inaugural parade of Jefferson Davis, first and only president 

of the Confederate States of America, the would-be nation 

whose championing of slavery sparked the Civil War. Now, a 

century later, the descendants of black slaves approached the 

state 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 [80 

kilometers], but we have come from three centuries of 

suffering and hardship. We have come to you, the Governor 

of 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.

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 the 

Montgomery 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.”

“How long? Not long. Because no lie can live forever,” said Martin Luther 

King, Jr. at the end of the Selma-to-Montgomery march. Pictured here: King 

delivering a sermon at his Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, Georgia.
FREE AT LAST: THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT 61

The just concluded march, King said, was “a shining 

moment in the conscience of man.” He singled out as 

honorable and inspiring “the pilgrimage of clergymen 

and laymen of every race and faith pouring into Selma to 

face danger at the side of its embattled Negroes.” “Like an 

idea whose time has come,” King continued, “not even the 

marching of mighty armies can halt us. We are moving to the 

land of freedom.”

We must come to see that the end we seek is a society at 

peace with itself, a society that can live with its conscience. 

That will be a day not of the white man, not of the black 

man. That will be the day of man as man.

I know you are asking today, “How long will it take?” I come 

to 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 and 

of 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 among 

us 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 the 

American 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 Does

The 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 that 

some state and local officials had systematically deprived 

blacks of those rights. The Voting Rights Act accordingly 

authorized the federal government to assume control of 

the 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 were 

thus “covered,” as were a number of counties in several other 

states. Covered jurisdictions were prohibited from modifying 

their voting rules and regulations without first affording 

federal officials the opportunity to review the change for 

discriminatory intent or effect. Other provisions barred the 

future use of literacy tests and directed the attorney general of 

the United States to commence legal action to end the use of 

poll taxes in state elections. (The Twenty-Fourth Amendment 

to the U.S. Constitution, ratified in January 1964, already 

barred the poll tax in elections for federal office.)

The introduction of federal “examiners” ended the mass 

intimidation of potential minority voters. The results were 

dramatic. By the end of 1965, the five states of the Deep South 

alone registered 160,000 new African-American voters. By 

2000, African-American registration rates trailed that of 

whites by only 2 percent. In the South, where in 1965 only two 

African Americans served either in the U.S. Congress or a 

state 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.
White Southerners’ Reactions to

the Civil Rights Movement

African Americans 

who waged epic 

struggles for civil 

rights also altered white 

Southerners’ worlds. Some 

whites embraced the 

prospect of a new interracial 

land. Many more reacted 

with hostility. They feared 

social and political change, 

and grappled uncomfortably 

with the fact that their way of 

life seemed gone for good. 

The “Southern way of life” 

encompassed a distinctive 

mix of economic, social, 

and cultural practices — 

symbolized by the fragrant 

magnolia, the slow pace 

of life, and the sweet mint 

julep, a popular alcoholic 

beverage. It also contained 

implications about the 

region’s racial order — one in 

which whites wielded power 

and blacks accommodated. 

Centuries of slavery and 

decades of segregation 

cemented a legal and political 

system characterized by 

white dominance. By the 

20th century, “Jim Crow” 

had become a shorthand for 

legalized segregation. (That 

phrase derived from the 

name of a character in a 19th 

century minstrel show in 

which whites wore blackface 

makeup and caricatured slave 

culture.) Massive inequalities 

marked every facet of daily 

life. Blacks always addressed 

whites as “Mr.” or “Mrs.,” 

though whites seldom 

bestowed such courtesy titles 

on African Americans. Blacks 

labored in white homes as 

nannies, cooks, maids, and 

yardmen. Whites expected 

docility; black resistance 

seemed unfathomable.

Through the long years of 

slavery and segregation, white 

Southerners produced and 

absorbed cruel stereotypes 

about African Americans: 

that they were unclean and 

shiftless, unintelligent and 

oversexed. Blacks became 

either clowns or savages, with 

no area in between. Whites 

often defined themselves — 

their status, identities, daily 

lives, and self-worth — in 

relation to these concocted 

notions about African 

Americans. If blacks were 

submissive and infantile, 

whites were strong and 

dignified. Blackness meant 

degradation; to be free was 

to be white. The civil rights 

struggle threatened to hoist 

African Americans up and 

out of this social “place” that 

whites had created for them. 

White Southerners would 

find blacks in their schools 

and neighborhoods, their 

restaurants, and polling 

places. Many whites feared 

this vision of the Southern 

future.

Many white Southerners 

came to believe that African 

Americans abided — and 

even enjoyed — their roles as 

second-class citizens. When 

the civil rights movement 

tore through the South in the 

1950s and 1960s, it exposed 

the falsity of such beliefs. At 

long last, African Americans 

voiced their discontent and 

demanded dignity. Black 

rebellion clashed so sharply 

with white perceptions that 

many 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 Southern 

schools would become the 

first battlegrounds. The court 

ruled that segregated schools 

stamped black children with 

a “badge of inferiority,” and 

that Southern states must 

integrate their schools “with 

all 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 Byrd 

of Virginia claimed the 

court had overstepped its 

bounds. White Southerners 

tried to circumvent the 

order, and rallied to beat 

back desegregation at every 

turn. Local leaders and 

businessmen organized 

themselves into Citizens 

Councils, groups that visited 

economic reprisal upon any 

blacks — or whites — who 

dared advocate integration.

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

Demonstrators protesting the integration of a New Orleans, Louisiana, public 

elementary school, 1960.
In 1957, a federal court 

ordered integration of the 

Little Rock, Arkansas, public 

schools. Nine blacks were 

selected to enroll in Little 

Rock’s Central High School, 

but Governor Orval Faubus 

blocked the students from 

the schoolhouse door. After 

initial 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. When 

several 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 a 

scene they thought had died 

with Reconstruction: that 

of federal troops protecting 

blacks’ civil rights in the 

South.

A similar conflagration 

erupted in New Orleans 

when that city became the 

first in the Deep South to 

desegregate. In November 

1960, four African-American 

girls integrated Frantz 

Elementary School in the 

city’s Ninth Ward. That 

neighborhood was one of the 

city’s poorest. In addition to 

grievances against organized 

blacks and an active 

federal government, white 

Southerners also felt deep 

class divides. White Ninth 

Ward residents believed that 

the city’s rich and powerful 

had foisted integration 

upon them — and them 

alone. Across the region, 

poor whites shouldered the 

“burden” of integration. If 

the upper classes maintained 

social safety valves like 

country clubs, private schools, 

and exclusive suburbs, 

poorer whites confronted 

the fact that their public 

schools, swimming pools, 

and neighborhoods were 

often the first to experience 

desegregation.

Millions of white 

Southerners found 

champions in politicians 

such as Alabama’s governor, 

George Wallace, who both 

cultivated and exploited for 

political gain a deep anti-civilrights sentiment. In his 1963 

inaugural address, Wallace 

declared: “Segregation now, 

segregation tomorrow, 

segregation forever.” He 

became the very picture of 

white resistance. Members 

of the Ku Klux Klan — a 

violent organization driven 

by racism, anti-Semitism, 

and nativism — persisted 

in a similar delusion: that 

the bloodshed they inflicted 

could postpone the day of 

racial equality. In 1963 in 

Birmingham, Alabama, 

Klansmen bombed a black 

Baptist church and killed four 

girls. The next year, Klansmen 

in Philadelphia, Mississippi, 

murdered three civil rights 

workers and buried them 

under an earthen dam. Such 

gruesome violence sickened 

many white Southerners, 

and rifts emerged within the 

white South. Still, a majority 

desired the same end — a 

return to the nostalgic days 

when blacks doffed their hats 

to whites and acquiesced to 

their roles in the segregated 

Jim Crow order. 

Extremism on one side 

often handed victory to the 

other. The Klan’s horrifying 

violence pricked white 

America’s conscience and, 

ultimately, moved the nation 

closer to passage of epic civil 

rights legislation — the 1964 

Civil Rights Act and the 1965 

Voting Rights Act. When 

President Lyndon Johnson, 

himself a native Texan and a 

Southerner, helped usher the 

legislation through Congress, 

white Southerners felt 

betrayed. 

The Civil Rights Act 

integrated businesses and 

public facilities. Suddenly, 

whites had to serve blacks 

in their stores and dine 

beside them at restaurants. 

Such changes shattered the 

rhythm of white southerners’ 

daily lives. Many whites 

denounced the “Civil Wrongs 

Bill,” holding that such federal 

laws imperiled their own 

rights. They clung to the 

notion that rights were finite, 

and that as blacks gained 

freedom, whites must suffer 

a loss of their own liberties. 

On the precarious seesaw 

of Southern race relations, 

whites thought they would 

plummet if blacks ascended.

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

Often hooded, members of the Ku Klux Klan advocated white supremacy and 

employed terrorism, violence, and lynching against African Americans, Jews, 

and Roman Catholics, among others.
Throughout black-majority 

areas, the Voting Rights Act 

granted African Americans 

a stunning new power. In 

these citadels of the old 

slave South, where whites 

were outnumbered by a 

ratio of almost four-to-one, 

blacks voted some of their 

own into political office. In 

several rural locales, like 

Macon County and Greene 

County, Alabama, African 

Americans suddenly wielded 

political power. Before the 

civil rights years, few whites 

could have conceived of 

such transformations. By 

the 1970s, the previously 

unthinkable became political 

reality.

The civil rights movement 

forever altered white 

Southerners’ everyday lives, 

upended their traditional 

attitudes about blacks, and, 

in some towns, shifted the 

balance of political power. 

It stripped the veneers 

of 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 with 

any weapons at their disposal. 

Others attempted to avoid 

the upheaval; they tried to 

maintain cherished ways of 

life even as the ground shifted 

beneath their feet. In the end, 

evasion proved impossible. 

While whites fought the 

civil rights movement 

with varying strategies of 

resistance, 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, some 

whites felt they had been 

liberated — freed from 

the mandate to degrade 

and oppress, free from the 

roles they assumed in the 

constricting 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 civil 

rights movement, African 

Americans could attend 

integrated schools, they ran 

for — and won — political 

office, and they lived with 

a dignity that the culture 

of Jim Crow had denied. 

These changes also seeped 

into white Southern life and 

reshaped its very contours. 

The civil rights movement 

pushed Southerners, black 

and white alike, further 

along the path toward racial 

equality.

By Jason Sokol

A Mellon Postdoctoral 

Fellow at the University of 

Pennsylvania, Sokol is also 

the author of There Goes My 

Everything: White Southerners 

in the Age of Civil Rights.

Lunchtime in an integrated public school.

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

Epilogue

On March 21, 1965, 

as civil rights 

advocates and their 

supporters gathered in Selma, 

a local Southern Christian 

Leadership Conference 

leader warned the press 

that the “irresponsibility” of 

the more militant activists 

might cause the movement 

enormous harm. The 

Reverend Jefferson P. Rogers 

was referring to the Student 

Nonviolent Coordinating 

Committee, whose leadership 

was growing increasingly 

impatient with the gradualist 

strategy of Martin Luther 

King and the mainstream 

civil rights movement. Nearly 

every broad-based social 

movement faces similar 

tensions, but the years and 

decades that followed would 

prove the wisdom of the 

strategy pursued by Thurgood 

Marshall, King, and the 

others. The great triumphs 

of the civil rights movement 

were evidence that, in a 

nation of laws, the key to 

progress lay in establishing 

the real legal equality of 

African Americans — in 

public facilities, in places of 

education, and, most of all, at 

the voting booth.

But this truth was not 

yet apparent. By May 

1966, Stokley Carmichael, 

veteran of numerous voter 

registration drives, had 

established himself as the 

new head of SNCC. In 

a speech at Greenwood, 

Mississippi, Carmichael 

raised a call for “Black 

Power.” Where Thurgood 

Marshall and Martin 

Luther King Jr. had sought 

integration, Carmichael 

instead sought separation. 

Integration, he said, was “an 

insidious subterfuge, for 

the maintenance of white 

supremacy.” Meanwhile, 

the Black Panther Party, 

(some accounts trace the 

name to a visual emblem for 

illiterate voters used in an 

Alabama voter registration 

drive) founded in Oakland, 

California, in October 1966 

by 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 enjoyed 

a 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, and 

fragmented the Panther 

movement. It petered out in 

a maze of factionalism and 

mutual recriminations.

The year 1968 was one of 

political upheaval throughout 

much of the Western world. 

In the United States, that year 

would see the assassination 

of Senator Robert F. Kennedy, 

who as attorney general had 

provided timely assistance to 

civil rights activists. And it 

would see the end of King’s 

remarkable career.

It was a measure of the 

civil 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 

More than at any time in our nation’s 

history, we are all Americans.
66 FREE AT LAST: THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT

striking — and primarily 

black — sanitation workers. 

King’s last address drew 

strongly on his lifelong study 

of the Bible. It would prove 

prophetic:

Well, I don’t know what 

will happen now; we’ve 

got some difficult days 

ahead. But it really 

doesn’t matter with me 

now, because I’ve been 

to the mountaintop. 

And I don’t mind. Like 

anybody, I would like 

to live a long life — 

longevity has its place. 

But I’m not concerned 

about that now. I just 

want to do God’s will. 

And He’s allowed me to 

go up to the mountain. 

And I’ve looked over, and 

I’ve seen the Promised 

Land. I may not get there 

with 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 the 

coming of the Lord. 

An assassin’s bullet took 

King’s life the very next day. 

He was 39 years old. The 

medical examiners said he 

died with the heart of a 60 

year old, because King had 

for so long carried the burden 

of so many. Some 300,000 

Americans attended 

his funeral.

The murder of Martin 

Luther King Jr. set off riots 

in Washington, D.C., and 

in more than 100 other 

American cities. At that 

moment, the short of vision 

and the faint of heart might 

have questioned King’s life 

work. But the Promised Land 

that King described was in 

many ways far closer than it 

seemed on those angry, fire-lit 

nights of April 1968.

The Triumphs of the Civil 

Rights Movement

The historical experience 

of African Americans 

will always be unique. 

But meaningful federal 

enforcement of the right 

to vote equipped black 

Americans with the tools 

that immigrants and other 

minority groups long have 

used to pursue — and achieve 

— the American Dream. In 

the United States, people 

who vote wield real political 

power. With the vote — and 

the 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 the 

Montgomery 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 as 

chairpersons of influential 

congressional committees.

Owning a home long has been a 

large 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 Secretary 

of State.
FREE AT LAST: THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT 67

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 office 

as the nation’s secretary 

of state.

Black secondary school 

graduation rates have nearly 

tripled since 1966, and the 

rate of poverty has been 

nearly halved in that time. 

The emergence of a black 

middle class is a widely noted 

social development, as are 

the many successful AfricanAmerican entrepreneurs, 

scholars, and literary and 

artistic achievers. 

Although Americans 

continue to wrestle with 

racial issues, those issues 

differ profoundly from those 

addressed by Thurgood 

Marshall, Martin Luther 

King, and the civil rights 

movement. While today’s 

questions are no less real, 

they also reflect the genuine 

progress achieved over the 

decades that followed. 

Consider education, the 

subject of the Brown v. Board 

of Education decision. Recent 

Supreme Court decisions 

explore the permissible 

limits of “affirmative action” 

policies that seek to redress 

past discrimination and 

to require or encourage 

that public institutions 

reflect demographically the 

communities they serve. 

Judges are now asked to 

decide the competing needs 

in, for example, a school 

district that allows all parents 

to select their children’s 

school. If too many request a 

particular school, only some 

students may attend their 

first-choice institution. In 

that case, may the district 

assert, even as a “tiebreaker,” 

its desire to maintain a racial 

balance in that popular 

school to determine which 

requests will be honored? 

Should government 

intervene when schools are 

effectively segregated because 

of new housing patterns, and 

not, as in Linda Brown’s day, 

because millions of AfricanAmerican students were 

purposely segregated and 

relegated to shabby, inferior 

schools? 

Americans of all stripes 

can and do disagree over 

issues like this. And few 

American leaders have 

answers to these dilemmas. 

As this book goes to press, 

Barack Obama, the son of a 

black man from Kenya and a 

white woman from Kansas, 

has been elected President 

of the United States. In a 

campaign speech on race in 

America, Obama said that

the answer to the slavery 

question was already 

embedded within 

our Constitution — a 

Constitution that had at 

its very core the ideal of 

equal citizenship under 

the law; a Constitution 

that promised its people 

liberty, and justice, and 

a union that could be 

and should be perfected 

over time.

And, as the President-elect 

told the nation on the night of 

his electoral triumph

If there is anyone out 

there who still doubts 

that America is a 

place where all things 

are possible; who still 

wonders if the dream 

of our founders is alive 

in our time; who still 

questions the power of 

our democracy, tonight is 

your answer.

Obama’s victory is one 

measure of the nation’s 

progress. Another measure, 

surely the most important 

of all, is the emergence, not 

least among the younger 

Americans who will build 

the nation’s future, of a broad 

and deep consensus that the 

shameful histories of slavery, 

segregation, and disadvantage 

must be relegated to the past.

President-elect Barack 

Obama addresses a 

Chicago crowd on the 

night of his election to 

the presidency .
Executive Editor: George Clack

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