Civil Rights 1963
ESAD MA Communication Design Orientation Andrew Howard
Design Marisa Espinheira Edition June 2020
Civil Rights 1963
This book aims to raise the most important moments of the year 1963 related to the civil rights movement. Each moment is accompanied by notes and photos that help in contextualizing and demonstrating it.
Index
6-13
April The Children’s Crusade (Birmingham, AL) The “Mailman Murder” – the Death of William Moore (Gadsden, AL)
14-19
May Woolworth’s Sit-in
20-35
June Police brutality in Winona Jail The Stand in the Schoolhouse Door (Tuscaloosa, AL) John F. Kennedy’s Civil Rights Speech (Washington, DC) Assassination of Medgar Evers (Jackson, MS)
36-41
July Clyde Kennard’s Freedom and Death
42-47
August The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom
48-61
September Alabama White Students Flee Public School to Avoid Integration Bombing of 16th Street Baptist Church (Birmingham, AL) Alabama Supreme Court Upholds Black Woman’s Contempt Conviction
62-71
October Chicago School Boycott Free Southern Theater
72-83
November Freedom Ballot (or “Freedom Vote”) Malcolm X Speech: Message to the Grass Roots John F. Kennedy’s assassination
April The Children’s Crusade (Birmingham, AL)
Notes As the events of the Birmingham Campaign intensified on the city’s streets, Martin Luther King, Jr., composed a letter from his prison cell in Birmingham in response to local religious leaders’ criticisms of the campaign: “Never before have I written so long a letter. I’m afraid it is much too long to take your precious time. I can assure you that it would have been much shorter if I had been writing from a comfortable desk, but what else can one do when he is alone in a narrow jail cell, other than write long letters, think long thoughts and pray long
prayers?” (King, Why, 94–95). King’s 12 April 1963 arrest for violating Alabama’s law against mass public demonstrations took place just over a week after the campaign’s commencement. Following the initial circulation of King’s letter in Birmingham as a mimeographed copy, it was published in a variety of formats: as a pamphlet distributed by the American Friends Service Committee and as an article in periodicals such as Christian Century, Christianity and Crisis, the New
York Post, and Ebony magazine. The first half of the letter was introduced into testimony before Congress by Representative William Fitts Ryan (D–NY) and published in the Congressional Record. One year later, King revised the letter and presented it as a chapter in his 1964 memoir of the Birmingham Campaign, Why We Can’t Wait, a book modeled after the basic themes set out in “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” In Why We Can’t Wait, King recalled in an author’s note accompanying the letter’s
Civil Rights 1963
6-7
In early April, convinced that only national legislation is capable of eliminating legal, institutional segregation, Movement strategists embark on a campaign designed to break the practice in one of its toughest strongholds – Birmingham—and to garner enough national attention in the process that the Kennedy administration will be compelled to draft and champion a comprehensive civil rights bill. After issuing the Birmingham Manifesto on April 3 and enacting a Good Friday march that lands Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in the cell where he will pen “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” the campaign focuses on involving the city’s high school students. Their arrest promises less economic devastation to families and their age guarantees national visibility and outrage. William Moore was also an activist who supported the integration, however he never managed to deliver his letter to kennedy. On “D-Day” (May 2), 1000 students “ditch” classes to march two-by-two out of 16th Street Baptist Church and endure arrest. In the following week, thousands of more students are knocked off their feet by high-pressure water hoses, menaced by police dogs and angry whites, and incarcerated in improvised jails at the county fairgrounds. On the seventh day, city officials agree to negotiate with the Black community, and on May 9, a tentative agreement to end segregation is reached.
republication how the letter was written. It was begun on pieces of newspaper, continued on bits of paper supplied by a black trustee, and finished on paper pads left by King’s attorneys. After countering the charge that he was an “outside agitator” in the body of the letter, King sought to explain the value of a “nonviolent campaign” and its “four basic steps: collection of the facts to determine whether injustices exist; negotiation; self-purification; and direct action” (King, Why, 79). He went on to explain that the purpose of direct action was to create
a crisis situation out of which negotiation could emerge.
African American Children protesting on the streets of Birmingham, Alabama in 1963.
April The “Mailman Murder” – the Death of William Moore (Gadsden, AL)
Notes The Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), founded in 1942, became one of the leading activist organizations in the early years of the American civil rights movement. In the early 1960s, CORE, working with other civil rights groups, launched a series of initiatives: the Freedom Rides, aimed at desegregating public facilities, the Freedom Summer voter registration project and the historic 1963 March on Washington. CORE initially embraced a pacifist, non-violent approach to fighting racial segregation, but by the late 1960s the group’s leadership had shifted its
focus towards the political ideology of black nationalism and separatism. For the next two decades, CORE introduced a small group of civil rights activists to the idea of achieving change through nonviolence, but during these years, its chapters were all in the North and its membership predominantly white and middle class.
small staff to work in the South. The group first drew national attention in 1960 with its active support of the sit-in movement at lunch counters that refused to serve blacks. Symbolic of the organization’s new direction was the appointment in February 1961 of James Farmer, as CORE’s first black national director.
In 1955 CORE went into the South and provided nonviolence training to demonstrators during the Montgomery, Alabama, bus boycott. Soon thereafter, CORE hired a
A few months later, CORE organized the first Freedom Ride to desegregate interstate transportation facilities. Although the riders were attacked so brutally in Alabama that they
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As a way of demonstrating support for ending segregation and solidarity with Movement activists, who where at the time attempted a continuous boycott of white-owned stores, U.S. postal worker William Moore – member of the Baltimore chapter of Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), and former U.S. Marine – embarks on April 20th upon a solo freedom journey from Chattanooga, TN, to Jackson, MS. Moore stops at the White House first, in hopes of informing President Kennedy that he plans to hand-deliver his own letter, a letter in support of integration, to Mississippi Gov. Ross Barnett at the conclusion of his march. Moore is not granted a meeting in Washington, but his walk attracts attention: pushing his gear in a postal handcart, Moore wears sandwich-board signs reading: “End Segregation in America” and “Eat at Joe’s‑‑Black and White.” His body is discovered on April 23 by the side of U.S. Highway 11, in Attalla, AL (near Gadsden) with two bullets in his head. Two groups of Movement workers seek to complete Moore’s march but are arrested in the process.
were unable to continue, more than a thousand participants, black and white, carried on Freedom Rides during the summer. Starting in late 1961, voter registration became the new civil rights priority, and CORE focused on Florida, Louisiana and South Carolina. At this time many civil rights workers were beginning to feel that black political power, not integration, offered the best hope for achieving racial equality. Although CORE did not abandon its commitment to racial understanding–it
was, for instance, a cosponsor of the March on Washington in August 1963–it placed increasing emphasis on black autonomy.
William Lewis Moore letter
Notes
May Woolworth’s Sit-in
Notes Anne Moody was a writer and civil rights activist best known for her memoir, Coming of Age in Mississippi (1968). In the early 1960s, while a student at Tougaloo College, she worked with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), and the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). When she graduated from Johnson High School in 1959, Moody received a basketball scholarship to Natchez Junior College. Two years later, she transferred to Tougaloo
College. After her roommate invited her to an NAACP Youth Council meeting, Moody became increasingly involved in the Civil Rights Movement. During the summer of 1963, Moody became a full-time organizer for CORE, working with the voter registration campaign in Canton, Mississippi and was added to a “hit-list” distributed by the Ku Klux Klan. In August, she attended the March on Washington.
Civil Rights 1963
After an ongoing boycott of white-owned stores proves incapable of breaking segregation, student activists trained in nonviolence sit-in at Woolworth’s lunch counter in downtown Jackson. They are surrounded by a mob of whites who curse them, punch them, kick them, and douse them with mustard, ketchup, and sugar. The direct action gives rise to mass meetings, mass marches, mass arrests, and an iconic photograph of the protestors, above. They included Anne Moody, whose autobiography Coming of Age in Mississippi would become a classic text of the times.
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John Salter, Joan Trumpauer, and Anne Moody sit in at the downtown Woolworth’s in Jackson, Mississippi on May 28, 1963.
Notes
Ronald Martin, Robert Patterson and Mark Martin sit at a whites-only lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina, on February 2, 1960.
June Police brutality in Winona Jail
Notes Hamer dedicated her life to the fight for civil rights, working for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). This organization was comprised mostly of African American students who engaged in acts of civil disobedience to fight racial segregation and injustice in the South. These acts often were met with violent responses by angry whites. During the course of her activist career, Hamer was threatened, arrested, beaten, and shot at. But none of these things ever deterred her from her work.In 1964, Hamer helped found the
Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, which was established in opposition to her state’s all-white delegation to that year’s Democratic convention. She brought the civil rights struggle in Mississippi to the attention of the entire nation during a televised session at the convention. The next year, Hamer ran for Congress in Mississippi, but she was unsuccessful in her bid.Along with her political activism, Hamer worked to help the poor and families in need in her Mississippi community.
Civil Rights 1963
On June 9, 1963, while returning from a voter registration workshop in South Carolina, Fannie Lou Hamer and other civil rights activists were arrested in Winona, Mississippi. Ms. Hamer and the other activists had been traveling in the “white” section of a Greyhound bus despite threats from the driver that he planned to notify local police at the next stop. When the bus arrived at the Winona bus depot, the activists sat at the “white only” lunch counter inside the terminal. Winona Police Chief Thomas Herrod ordered the group to go to the “colored” side of the depot and arrested them when one of the activists tried to write down his patrol car license number. In August 1964, while testifying at the Democratic National Convention to urge party bosses to seat a group of black Mississippi voters seated as delegates, Mrs. Hamer recalled the abuse she endured that night at the county jail. “It wasn’t too long before three white men came to my cell,” she said. “One of these men was a State Highway Patrolman and he asked me where I was from. I told him Ruleville and he said, ‘We are going to check this.’ They left my cell and it wasn’t too long before they came back. He said, ‘You are from Ruleville all right,’ and he used a curse word. And he said, ‘We are going to make you wish you was dead.’” The white officers then forced two African American prisoners to brutally beat Ms. Hamer with loaded blackjacks; she was nearly killed. As Mrs. Hamer regained consciousness, she overheard one of the white officers propose, “We could put them SOBs in [the] Big Black [River] and nobody would ever find them.” Ms. Hamer never fully recovered from the attack; she lost vision in one of her eyes and suffered permanent kidney damage, which contributed to her death in 1977 at age 59. Lawyers with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) filed suit against the Winona police who brutalized the activists, but an all-white jury acquitted them. Despite the trauma she experienced, Ms. Hamer returned to Mississippi to continue organizing voter registration drives and remained active in civil rights causes until her death.
20 - 21
Fannie Lou Hamer, speaks before the credentials committee of the Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City on Aug. 22, 1964
Notes
June The Stand in the Schoolhouse Door (Tuscaloosa, AL)
Notes In 1952, Autherine Lucy applied to the University of Alabama’s graduate program in Library Sciences with the goal of becoming a librarian. After realizing that Ms. Lucy was African American, the university denied her enrollment, sparking a three-year legal battle led by the NAACP. The battle appeared to end favorably for Ms. Lucy in 1955 when the United States Supreme Court ordered the University of Alabama to accept her, making her the university’s first African American student. Unfortunately, Ms. Lucy’s fight to desegregate the University
of Alabama and obtain a graduate education was far from over. On February 3, 1956, Ms. Lucy registered and attended her first classes at the university, passing burning crosses and crowds of hostile students on her way to and from class. On February 6, 1956, the environment around Ms. Lucy descended into a full-scale riot. Thousands of angry white students and community members gathered on campus and followed Ms. Lucy, hurling threats, racial slurs, eggs, and rocks at her as she
passed between classes. The unrestrained mob eventually trapped Ms. Lucy in a dormitory until, hours later, she was rescued by police. That evening, university officials suspended Ms. Lucy, citing safety concerns. Despite a court order to reinstate Ms. Lucy, university trustees voted to expel her for her accusations of conspiracy, ending Ms. Lucy’s efforts to desegregate the university.
Civil Rights 1963
Following Gov. George W. Wallace’s 1962 campaign promise to defend segregation at all costs, “…to the point of standing in the schoolhouse door, if necessary,” he does just that on June, 11, 1963, when three black students—Vivian Malone of Mobile, James Hood of Gadsden, and Dave McGlathery of Huntsville—arrive to register at the University of Alabama. Given that a federal injunction virtually guaranteed their admission, Wallace’s stonewalling stunt is largely for the benefit of waiting television news cameras and in consideration of his political prospects. The students’ historic admission followed Autherine Lucy’s unsuccessful 1956 attempt to desegregate the University.
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Vivian Malone entering Foster Auditorium through a crowd that includes photographers, National Guard members, and the Deputy U.S. Attorney General.
Notes
June
John F. Kennedy’s Civil Rights Speech (Washington, DC)
Notes Elected in 1960 as the 35th president of the United States, 43-year-old John F. Kennedy became one of the youngest U.S. presidents, as well as the first Roman Catholic. He was born into one of America’s wealthiest families and parlayed an elite education and a reputation as a military hero into a successful run for Congress in 1946 and for the Senate in 1952. As president, Kennedy confronted mounting Cold War tensions in Cuba, Vietnam and elsewhere. He also led a renewed drive for public service and eventually provided federal support for the
growing civil rights movement. During his first year in office, Kennedy oversaw the launch of the Peace Corps, which would send young volunteers to underdeveloped countries all over the world. Otherwise, he was unable to achieve much of his proposed legislation during his lifetime, including two of his biggest priorities: income tax cuts and a civil rights bill. Kennedy was slow to commit himself to the civil rights cause, but was eventually forced into action, sending federal troops to support the desegregation of the University
of Mississippi after riots there left two dead and many others injured. The following summer, Kennedy announced his intention to propose a comprehensive civil rights bill and endorsed the massive March on Washington that took place that August. Kennedy was an enormously popular president, both at home and abroad, and his family drew famous comparisons to King Arthur’s court at Camelot. His brother Bobby served as his attorney general, while the youngest Kennedy son, Edward (Ted),
Civil Rights 1963
On the evening of June 11, following Gov. Wallace’s infamous stand in the schoolhouse door, President Kennedy addresses the nation on the issue of civil rights, for the first time roundly condemning segregation and announcing his intention to submit a comprehensive civil rights bill to Congress.
was elected to Jack’s former Senate seat in 1962. Jackie Kennedy became an international icon of style, beauty and sophistication, though stories of her husband’s numerous marital infidelities (and his personal association with members of organized crime) would later emerge to complicate the Kennedys’ idyllic image.
28 - 29
President John F. Kennedy makes a nationwide televised broadcast on civil rights in the White House, June 11, 1963.
Notes
June Assassination of Medgar Evers (Jackson, MS)
Notes The NAACP or National Association for the Advancement of Colored People was established in 1909 and is America’s oldest and largest civil rights organization. It was formed in New York City by white and black activists, partially in response to the ongoing violence against African Americans around the country. The NAACP played a pivotal role in the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. One of the organization’s key victories was the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1954 decision in
Brown v. Board of Education that outlawed segregation in public schools. Pioneering civil-rights attorney Thurgood Marshall, the head of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund (LDF), successfully argued the case before the court. Marshall, who founded the LDF in 1940, won a number of other important civil rights cases involving issues such as voting rights and discriminatory housing practices. In 1967, he became the first African American to serve as a Supreme Court justice.
The NAACP also helped organize the 1963 March on Washington, one of the biggest civil rights rallies in U.S. history, and had a hand in running 1964’s Mississippi Freedom Summer, an initiative to register black Mississippians to vote. During this era, the NAACP also successfully lobbied for the passage of landmark legislation including the Civil Rights Act of 1964, prohibiting discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex or national origin, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, barring
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Returning home after a late meeting following President Kennedy’s national address on civil rights, Medgar Evers is murdered in his driveway in the early hours of June 12, shot at close range with a high-powered rifle by white supremacist Byron De La Beckwith, of Greenwood. His two children and wife Myrlie witness his death. At the time of his assasination, Medgar Evers is the most prominent leader of the Mississippi freedom movement. The son of sharecroppers, he grows up in Decatur, Mississippi. He and his wife Myrlie move to Mound Bayou in the Mississippi delta where they begin organizing NAACP chapters in 1952. (Mound Bayou is a Black town founded by freed slaves in the late 1800s.) In 1954 Medgar becomes the state’s first NAACP field secretary, courageously traveling the state to organize and sustain the movement. He plays a key role in the desegregation of the University of Mississippi and the Jackson Movement. Medgar’s assassination is part of a KKK plot to simultaneously murder freedom workers in three states: Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama. Later that day, Klansman brutally beat SNCC worker Bernard Lafayette in Selma Alabama. Rev. Elton Cox, a CORE worker in Louisiana is also targeted, but the Klan is unable to locate him.
racial discrimination in voting. The organization received some criticism for its strategy of working through the judicial system and lawmakers to achieve its goals, rather than focusing on more direct methods of protest favored by other national civil rights groups. Ku Klux Klan, a secret, masked society dedicated to maintaining white supremacy, which entailed ensuring that newly emancipated African Americans would never be able to access political, civil or economic
rights. One group was founded immediately after the Civil War and lasted until the 1870s. The other began in 1915 and has continued to the present. The KKK remained confined to the South until the 1920s, when it exploded into a mass movement in the northern states. Spurred by the 1915 film The Birth of a Nation, which depicted savage, bestial African Americans intent on raping white women who were rescued by the heroic KKK, it amassed somewhere between 3 and 6 million members.
Medgar Evers’ widow, Myrlie, comforts the couple’s 9-year-old son, Darrel, at her husband’s funeral in Jackson, Miss., on June 15, 1963.
July Clyde Kennard’s Freedom and Death
Notes On December 6, 1958, Kennard wrote a detailed letter to the local newspaper, the Hattiesburg American, in which he announced his intention to enroll at Mississippi Southern for the January quarter. In the letter, Kennard laid out his “creed,” which was based on the belief that all individuals should be judged by their ability rather than their skin color. Sovereignty Commission’s investigators, led by former FBI agent Zack J. VanLandingham, responded by trying to find “derogatory information” about Kennard to sabotage his application. They
explored every possible aspect of the applicant’s life, including his financial history, his personal life, and his employment record. State leaders, including Governor James P. Coleman, soon realized that Kennard’s application was particularly problematic because there were no obvious grounds for refusing it. Once sentenced, Kennard received brutal treatment in the high-security Parchman Penitentiary where he had to work long days on the prison’s cotton plantation. His
only respite came on Sundays when he was able to teach illiterate inmates reading and writing. After a year of hard field work, Kennard began to complain of severe abdominal pains. As his condition rapidly worsened, he was taken to the University of Mississippi Hospital in Jackson, where doctors found a large lesion in his left colon. Kennard received no medical treatment, however, and was sent back to the cotton fields at Parchman. In June 1962, hospital medical record librarian Mary Senter reported that doctors had given Kennard
Civil Rights 1963
Clyde Kennard, a WWII veteran, returned to his home of Eatonville Mississippi to help the family farm. Kennard had finished the first three years of his political science degree in Chicago and intended to transfer to a University in Mississippi to complete his degree. There were no black colleges in southern Mississippi in the 1950s, so Kennard applied to Mississippi Southern College, now the University of Southern Mississippi, in Hattiesburg. Between 1955 and 1959, Clyde Kennard applied three times to the Mississippi Southern College. He was denied admission every time on a series of technicalities. Kennard had no intention of silently giving up on his education. He wrote of his attempts to gain admission to the College in a letter to the local newspaper, the Hattiesburg American. In September of 1960, Kennard was arrested and tried on the fabricated charges of stealing $25 worth of chicken feed from the Forrest County Cooperative. In just ten minutes an all-white jury found Kennard guilty and sentenced him to seven years in prison. During his incarceration Kennard was forced to work at the notorious Parchman Prison’s cotton plantation. Within a year Kennard was unable to work due to intense pain and was hospitalized where it was discovered that he had cancer. After doctors notified him that he was unlikely to live much longer, friends, family members, and supporters led a campaign for his release. In February of 1963, he was released and flown to Chicago where he died on July 4, 1963.
only a 20 percent chance of living five years. As a result, she recommended that Kennard be given early parole on medical grounds, a plea that was ignored by Governor Ross Barnett. Although he lost forty pounds, his captors accused him of feigning illness in order to avoid work. Guards even instructed other prisoners to carry Kennard into the fields and return him to his cell when he collapsed.
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Letter transcribed with original punctuation. Provided by the Mississippi Department of Archives and History (MDAH) Sovereignty Commission Collection.
Route 1, Box 70 Hattiesburg, Mississippi September 25, 1959 THE RACE QUESTION Editor, The charge that any person who believes in any form of integration of the races is a Communist or an out-side agitator has been made so constantly and with such force that it would not surprise me if there are some people who are innocent enough to believe, if not all, at least some portion of that charge. It is for the benefit of these unfortunate people that I review, briefly, the fundamental principle upon which the conviction of the integrationists is based. Most basic to our beliefs about the race question in America today is that there can be no racial segregation without some racial discrimination, and that there cannot be a complete racial equalization without some racial integration. Now this principle is an easy one for us to follow, for it holds as true in human history, especially American History, as it does in logic. Reason tells us that two things, different in location, different in constitution, different in origin, and different in purpose cannot possibly be equal. History has verified this conclusion. For nearly a century now the State of Mississippi has been under a supposedly separate but equal system. Let us ask ourselves, does the history of the system support the theory of the segregationists or the theory of the integrationists? What segregationist in his right mind would honestly claim that the facilities for the two races are equal? Still segregationists say, give us a little more time, we are really making progress. Perhaps they are making progress of some kind, but human life is not long enough to extend their time. They have had nearly a hundred years to prove their theory, and so far they are no closer to proof than when they began. Kennard Letter to Editor, 1959 | Zinn Education ProjectThe differences which we now have over this matter of segregation versus integration have, unfortunately, been characterized by some as a mortal contest between out-side agitators and-or Communists, and peaceful, law-abiding citizens. This is furthest from the truth. The question is whether or not citizens of the same country, the same state, the same city, shall have equal opportunities to earn their living, to select the people who shall govern them, and raise and educate their children in a free democratic manner: or whether or not because of the accident of color, one half of the citizens shall be excluded from society as though they had leprosy? If there is one quality of Americans which would set them apart from almost any other peoples, it is the history of their struggle for liberty and justice under the law. Lincoln has rightly said that this nation was conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Truly, the history of America is inseparable from the ideals of John Locke, John Stuart Mill and Jean Rousseau. “We hold these truths to be self-evident, says our Declaration of Independence, that all men are created equal.” How different that statement is in spirit from the one which says: Before I see my child go to school with a Negro, I will destroy the whole school system. How different in virtue is the statement of Patrick Henry which says, “I know not what course others may take, but as for me give me liberty or give me death,” and the one which says, before I see a Negro with liberty I had rather see him dead. I find it indeed interesting that the people who come closest to the thinking of Fascists and
Communists in their activities should accuse the integrationists of that very thing. Is it the segregationists or the integrationists who are employing secret investigators to search the records and to apply pressure on any one suspected of opposing the present dictatorship of the minority by the majority? Is it the segregationists or the integrationists who are preaching the doctrine of the superiority of one race over another? Is it the segregationists or the integrationists who are dogmatically suppressing the aspirations of nearly half the people of this great state for their inalienable right to participate in their government? The segregationists give as their reason for not allowing Negroes to participate more fully in the general community activities that ninety-five percent of the Negroes are not interested, which would leave only five percent of the Negroes are interested. Now, assuming that their statement is correct, and knowing that no person nor group of people in the United States has the right to forbid even one single person his constitutional rights, what accounts for their actions? Some declare that the northern states can permit integration because they have only a few Negroes, but the South can’t do that because the South has so many Negroes. Well, according to their own estimates, only five percent of the Negroes in the South are interested in the general community activities, and five percent of the Negroes in any community would certainly not weigh very heavily in any critical issue even if we were to assume that they would all vote the same way. On the other hand, if a majority of the Negro people in this State desires to participate to the fullest extent in the general community activities and are being forbidden to do so either through fear or ignorance, then the segregationists of this State are guilty of one of the strangest and probably the most tragic dictatorships yet recorded by history. It is an easy matter, I suppose, for White people to misunderstand the aspirations of Negroes; this is understandable. But we have no desire for revenge in our hearts. What we want is to be respected as men and women, given an opportunity to compete with you in the great and interesting race of life. We want your friends to be our friends; we want your enemies to be our enemies; we want your hopes and ambitions to be our hopes and ambitions, and your joys and sorrows to be our joys and sorrows. The big question seems to be, can we achieve this togetherness in our time? If the segregationists have their way we shall not. For instead of preaching brotherly love and cooperation they are declaring the superiority of one race and the inferiority of the other. Instead of trying to show people how much they are alike, they are busy showing them how much they differ. Instead of appointing a commission to study the problem to determine whether integration or segregation is the best policy for Mississippi at this time, they appointed a commission to try to maintain segregation at all cost whether it is the best policy or not the best policy. In this matter I like to quote from the great Indian leader, Mahatma Gandhi, in his discourse on the existence of God. He says: “In the midst of death, life persists; in the midst of untruth, truth persists; in the midst of darkness light persists.� So, let it be, in our case. Respectfully submitted, Clyde Kennard
Clyde Kennard (right) with his sister, Sara Tarpley (left) after his parole in 1963 Public Domain
August The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom
Notes A close advisor to Martin Luther King and one of the most influential and effective organizers of the civil rights movement, Bayard Rustin was affectionately referred to as “Mr. March-on-Washington” by A. Philip Randolph (D’Emilio, 347). Rustin organized and led a number of protests in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, including the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. While Rustin’s homosexuality and former affiliation with the Communist Party led some to question King’s relationship with him, King recognized the importance
of Rustin’s skills and dedication to the movement. In a 1960 letter, King told a colleague: “We are thoroughly committed to the method of nonviolence in our struggle and we are convinced that Bayard’s expertness and commitment in this area will be of inestimable value”. For more than two decades, A. Philip Randolph had dreamed of a massive march on Washington for jobs and justice. As President of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, President of the Negro
American Labor Council, and Vice President of the AFL-CIO, he is the towering senior statesman of the Black struggle for equality and opportunity. Back in 1941, with the support of Bayard Rustin and A.J. Muste, Randolph had threatened to mobilize 100,000 Blacks to march on Washington to protest segregation in the armed forces and employment discrimination in the burgeoning war industries. To forestall Randolph’s march, President Roosevelt issued Executive Order 8802 (later known as the Fair Employment Act) which outlawed
Civil Rights 1963
Following President Kennedy’s civil rights address in June, SCLC leaders plan a mass action of national scale designed to ensure passage of civil rights legislation. Drawing together tens of thousands of Movement allies from across the nation – workers with SNCC, CORE, NAACP, and SCLC, as well as members of labor unions, interdenominational organizations, and student groups—the August 28 march from the Washington monument to the Lincoln memorial is the largest demonstration of its kind in history. The turnout was a testament to the organizational savvy of Bayard Rustin (who steered the event from idea to reality in a scant six weeks) and to the vision of Movement senior statesman A. Philip Randolph, who had dreamt of such a march for years. Arriving by special trains, private aircraft, automobiles, and more than 2,000 chartered buses, the marchers find the nation’s capital prepared for chaos and violence –neither of which occurs. Speakers include A. Philip Randolph, Bayard Rustin (who introduced Daisy Bates, Diane Nash, Prince E. Lee, Rosa Parks, and Gloria Richardson), John Lewis, Walter Reuther, Floyd McKissick, Whitney Young, Roy Wilkins, and Martin Luther King, Jr. The event closes with Rustin reading the march’s official demands and a benediction by Morehouse College president Benjamin Mays.
racial discrimination in the national defense industry. This was the first Federal action ever taken against racially-biased employment practices.
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Martin Luther King during the March On Washington at the Lincoln Memorial, Washington DC, where he gave his ‘I Have A Dream’ speech.
Notes
Bayard Rustin and Cleveland Robinson, March on Washington August 7, 1963
Notes
The 10 Demands of the March on Washington 1. Comprehensive and effective civil rights legislation from the present Congress — without compromise or filibuster — to guarantee all Americans: Access to all public accommodations Decent housing Adequate and integrated education The right to vote 2. Withholding of Federal funds from all programs in which discrimination exists. 3. Desegregation of all school districts in 1963. 4. Enforcement of the Fourteenth Amendment — reducing Congressional representation of states where citizens are disfranchised. 5. A new Executive Order banning discrimination in all housing supported by federal funds. 6. Authority for the Attorney General to institute injunctive suits when any Constitutional right is violated. 7. A massive federal program to train and place all unemployed workers — Negro and white — on meaningful and dignified jobs at decent wages. 8. A national minimum wage act that will give all Americans a decent standard of living. (Government surveys show that anything less than $2.00 an hour fails to do this.) [The minimum wage at the time of the march is $1.15/hour.] 9. A broadened Fair Labor Standards Act to include all areas of employment which are presently excluded. 10. A federal Fair Employment Practices Act barring discrimination by federal, state, and municipal governments, and by employers, contractors, employment agencies, and trade unions.
September Alabama White Students Flee Public School to Avoid Integration
Notes Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka was a landmark 1954 Supreme Court case in which the justices ruled unanimously that racial segregation of children in public schools was unconstitutional. Brown v. Board of Education was one of the cornerstones of the civil rights movement, and helped establish the precedent that “separate-but-equal” education and other services were not, in fact, equal at all. On January 14, 1963, George Wallace is inaugurated as the governor of Alabama,
promising his followers, “Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever!” His inauguration speech was written by Ku Klux Klan leader Asa Carter, who later reformed his white supremacist beliefs and wrote The Education of Little Tree under the pseudonym of Forrest Carter. (The book, which gives a fictitious account of Carter’s upbringing by a Scotch-Irish moonshiner and a Cherokee grandmother, poignantly describes the difficulties faced by Native Americans in American society.) In June 1963, under federal pressure, he
was forced to end his literal blockade of the University of Alabama and allow the enrollment of African-American students. Despite his failures in slowing the accelerating civil rights movement in the South, Wallace became a national spokesman for resistance to racial change and in 1964 entered the race for the U.S. presidency. Although defeated in most Democratic presidential primaries he entered, his modest successes demonstrated the extent of popular backlash against integration. In 1968, he made another strong run as the candidate of the American
Civil Rights 1963
On September 10, 1963, white students began to withdraw from newly-integrated Tuskegee High School in Alabama to avoid attending school with black students. Within one week, all 275 white students had stopped attending the school. In January 1963, African American parents of students in Macon County, Alabama, sued the Macon County Board of Education to desegregate the county’s public schools. Though the United States Supreme Court had declared school segregation unconstitutional nearly nine years earlier, in Brown v. Board of Education, Macon County had taken no steps to integrate local schools. In August 1963, a federal court ordered the school board to begin integration immediately. The school board selected thirteen African American students to integrate Tuskegee High School that fall. On September 2, scheduled to be the first day of integrated classes, Alabama Governor George Wallace ordered the school closed due to “safety concerns.” The school reopened a week later, and withdrawals began soon after. Most of Tuskegee High School’s former white students enrolled at Macon Academy, a newly formed, all-white private school. In support of the community’s efforts to sidestep federal law and maintain school segregation, Governor Wallace and the school board approved the use of state funds to provide scholarships for white students abandoning the public school system to use at Macon Academy. Meanwhile, the Macon County School Board ordered Tuskegee High School closed due to low enrollment and split its remaining African American students among all-white high schools in the towns of Notasulga and Shorter. White students in those high schools boycotted for several days in protest, and many eventually transferred to Macon Academy. Now known as Macon East Academy and located near the city of Montgomery, the former Macon Academy is one of several private schools in the Alabama Black Belt with origins rooted in resistance to integration. As of the 2015-2016 school year, Macon-East Academy’s student body of 277 was 97% white and less than 3% African American.
Independent Party and managed to get on the ballot in all 50 states. On Election Day, he drew 10 million votes from across the country.
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A group of teenage girls scream obscenities at black students entering their high school in Montgomery, Alabama.
Notes
Teenage boys wave Confederate flags during a protest against school integration in Montgomery, Alabama, 1963
Notes
September Bombing of 16th Street Baptist Church (Birmingham, AL)
Notes The Birmingham Campaign was a movement led in early 1963 by the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) which sought to bring national attention of the efforts of local black leaders to desegregate public facilities in Birmingham, Alabama. The campaign was led by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Reverends James Bevel and Fred Shuttlesworth, among others.
In April 1963, King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) joined Birmingham’s local campaign organized by Rev. Shuttlesworth and his group, the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights (ACMHR). The goal of the local campaign was to attack the city’s segregation system by putting pressure on Birmingham’s merchants during the Easter season, the second biggest shopping season of the year. When that campaign stalled, the ACMHR asked SCLC to help.
The campaign was originally scheduled to begin in early March 1963 but was postponed until April. On April 3, 1963, it was launched with mass meetings, lunch counter sit-ins, a march on city hall, and a boycott of downtown merchants. King spoke to Birmingham’s black citizens about nonviolence and its methods and appealed for volunteers. When Birmingham’s residents enthusiastically responded, the campaign’s actions expanded to kneel-ins at churches, sit-ins at the library, and a march on the county courthouse to register voters.
Civil Rights 1963
On September 15, less than three weeks after the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, a dynamite bomb planted by Klansmen explodes inside 16th Street Baptist Church, killing four young girls: Addie Mae Collins (14), Denise McNair (11), Carole Robertson (14), and Cynthia Wesley (14). More than 20 others are injured in the attack, timed to occur during a “Youth Day” tribute to the part of local young people in the Birmingham Campaign. It is the city’s 28th racial bombing. Justice in the case, recounted in Spike Lee’s 1997 film “4 Little Girls” comes only much later. After the FBI provides long-concealed evidence, Robert Chambliss is convicted of murder in 1977; Thomas Blanton in 2001; and, Bobby Frank Cherry, in 2002. (The fourth bomber, Herman Cash, died in 1994 without ever being indicted.)
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The four girls killed during the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing.
Notes
September Alabama Supreme Court Upholds Black Woman’s Contempt Conviction
Notes The NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc. (LDF or, alternately, the ‘Inc. Fund’) provides legal services in the fight against racial discrimination. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) program for reform had long combined legal challenges to de jure segregation and disfranchisement with public campaigns such as anti-lynching legislation and expanded educational opportunities. But increasing pressure from the Internal Revenue System (IRS) in the 1930s
forced the NAACP to establish the separate LDF in 1940. It operates independently today as part of an ongoing struggle against racism in the United States. These tensions expanded after Marshall’s success in the Brown v. Board of Education (1954), which formally overturned the Plessy decision. Southern states responded to the momentous Supreme Court decision with both a variety of stalling tactics and crackdowns on organizations promoting
integration and racial reform. Lawyers associated with the NAACP and the LDF were threatened with charges of illegally or unethically drumming up legal business in their pursuit of implementing the Brown decision while NAACP chapters were directed to register all members and contributors with the state, strategies intended to break down both organizations’ ability to operate in the South. By 1957 the LDF agreed formally to separate from the NAACP, hoping to save legal energies and
Civil Rights 1963
On September 26, 1963, the Alabama Supreme Court upheld the contempt conviction of Mary Hamilton, a black woman who refused to allow an Alabama district attorney to disrespect her in court. In June 1963, Mary Hamilton was a field secretary for the Congress of Racial Equality in Alabama, and one of hundreds of activists arrested during civil rights protests in the city of Gadsden. At a court hearing to determine the legitimacy of those arrests, Ms. Hamilton took the witness stand for questioning. When Etowah County Solicitor William Rayburn addressed her by her first name only, after addressing earlier white witnesses as “Miss,” Ms. Hamilton refused to answer and Judge A.B. Cunningham held her in contempt. ‘Q What is your name, please? ‘A Miss Mary Hamilton. ‘Q Mary, I believe—you were arrested—who were you arrested by? ‘A My name is Miss Hamilton. Please address me correctly. ‘Q Who were you arrested by, Mary? ‘A I will not answer a question—— ‘BY ATTORNEY AMAKER: The witness’s name is Miss Hamilton. ‘A —your question until I am addressed correctly. ‘THE COURT: Answer the question. ‘THE WITNESS: I will not answer them unless I am addressed correctly. ‘THE COURT: You are in contempt of court—— ‘ATTORNEY CONLEY: Your Honor—your Honor—— ‘THE COURT: You are in contempt of this court, and you are sentenced to five days in jail and a fifty dollar fine.’ Ms. Hamilton served the jail time but refused to pay the fine and was allowed out on bond to appeal the conviction. The Alabama Supreme Court -- a panel of all-white justices -upheld the conviction unanimously. The NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund (LDF) appealed the case to the United States Supreme Court and urged the nation’s highest court to take action. “Petitioner’s reaction to being called ‘Mary’ in a court room where, if white, she would be called ‘Miss Hamilton,’ was not thin-skinned sensitivity,” LDF lawyers argued in their written filings. “She was responding to one of the most distinct indicia of the racial caste system. This is the refusal of whites to address Negroes with titles of respect.” In March 1964, with three of nine justices dissenting, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Ms. Hamilton’s contempt citation.
protect financial resources from attack. The separation financially benefitted the LDF as public interest in the Brown cases brought increasing donations to the legal organization while the NAACP found itself relying more heavily on membership fees for financial survival
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Mary Hamilton was found in contempt of court in Alabama, when she refused to answer questions after the prosecution addressed her only by her first name.
Notes
October Chicago School Boycott
Notes “Willis Wagons” was the pejorative term for portable school classrooms used by critics of Superintendent of Schools Benjamin C. Willis (1953–1966) when protesting school overcrowding and segregation in black neighborhoods from 1962 to 1966. Black parents, neighborhood organizations, and civil rights groups also urged authorities to permit black children to attend white schools with empty seats. Willis and the school board, however, resisted, preferring traditional neighborhood-based schools
and refusing to reconfigure boundaries. Blacks countered with sit-ins, boycotts, and marches. The Woodlawn Organization claimed that it coined the “Willis Wagons” label in its one-day boycott of Carnegie School, May 18, 1962. The boycott protested the arrival of six portable units to house students until a new school building opened in late 1963. Personalizing school segregation and overcrowding dramatized these issues and later drove Willis from office. But the portable
units and segregation both predated and outlived Willis’s administration.
Civil Rights 1963
On Oct. 22, 1963, a coalition of civil rights groups staged Freedom Day, a mass boycott and demonstration against segregated schools and inadequate resources for African American students in Chicago. In the aftermath of the Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court ruling, Chicago’s schools were overcrowded and underfunded, and the Chicago Board of Education refused to allow Black students to transfer to white schools. The Chicago Board disregarded the Brown ruling to integrate schools by claiming they were following a neighborhood schools policy that required students to attend a school if it was within walking distance of their home. In response to overcrowding, the Board of Education brought in mobile classrooms, which community members referred to as “Willis Wagons,” after the head of the Board of Education, Benjamin C. Willis. The board claimed these were temporary solutions, but for many of Chicago’s Black residents, they were endemic of the racial inequality in schooling. The movement against segregation and inequality in schools had been going on for years, but climaxed on October 22, 1963, when over 200,000 Chicago students boycotted school as part of “Freedom Day.” Additionally, at least 10,000 students, parents, and community members protested outside the headquarters of the Chicago Board of Education. Some signs read “Willis Must Go,” or “No Willis Wagons,” while others demanded integrated schools. While there wasn’t a clear-cut victory, the Board of Education felt the pressure and agreed to increase the number of black students who could transfer to white schools. Community members kept organizing after the successful 1963 boycott, even organizing another school boycott in 1965 in which 100,000 students boycotted classes.
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Flyer advertising Freedom Day School Boycott, an event to protest school segregation in Chicago, Illinois, 1963.
Notes
Crowd fills LaSalle Street between City Hall and the building housing Board of Education as thousands of demonstrators marched in Chicago on October 22, 1963.
Notes
October Free Southern Theater
Notes In October, SNCC members John O'Neal and Doris Derby join with actor/journalist Moses Gilbert and drama instructor William Hutchinson to establish the Drama Workshop at Tougaloo College just outside of Jackson. From that beginning grows the Free Southern Theater (FST). For Mississippi, the FST is unique — it is racially integrated, it won't play to segregated audiences, and it's productions reflect the social-change agenda of the Movement. Forthrightly, they proclaim the FST's relationship to the Freedom Movement:
Through theater, we think to open a new area of protest ... one that permits the growth of and self-knowledge of a Negro audience, one that supplements the present struggle for freedom. ... we feel that the theater will add a necessary dimension to the current Civil Rights Movement through its unique value as a means of education ... stimulate thought and a new awareness among Negroes in the deep South, ... work toward the establishment of permanent stock and repertory companies, with mobile touring units, in major population centers
throughout the South, staging plays that reflect the struggles of the American Negro. Our fundamental objective is to stimulate creative and reflective thought among Negroes in Mississippi and other Southern states by the establishment of a legitimate theater, thereby providing the opportunity in the theater and the associated art forms. We theorize that within the Southern situation a theatrical form and style can be developed that is as unique to the Negro people as the origin of blues and jazz. A combination of art and social awareness can evolve into plays
Civil Rights 1963
SNCC members John O’Neal and Doris Derby join actor/journalist Gilbert Moses and thespians at Tougaloo College to form the Drama Workshop, which grows into the Free Southern Theater (FST). Racially integrated and dedicated to social change, the FST takes live theater to poor, rural, mostly Black audiences across Mississippi Louisiana, Tennessee, and Georgia. Refusing to play to segregated audiences, the FST’s Freedom Summer Tour stages free performances of In White America, Purlie Victorious, Waiting for Godot, and others in churches and improvised community spaces. Acclaimed artists Harry Belafonte, Langston Hughes, Ossie Davis, Ruby Dee, James Baldwin, Loraine Hansberry, Sidney Poitier, Theodore Bikel, and Lincoln Kirstein support the project
written for a Negro audience, which relate to the problems within the Negro himself, and within the Negro community
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Gilbert Moses, left, and John O’Neal, two of the three founders of the Free Southern Theater, in 1965.
November Freedom Ballot (or “Freedom Vote�)
Notes The Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) was founded on April 26, 1964 as part of a voter registration project for African Americans in the state. For over half a century Mississippi blacks had attempted to attend regular Democratic Party meetings and conventions but were continually denied entry. They formed the MFDP, which welcomed both whites and blacks, to run several candidates for the Senate and Congressional elections on June 2, 1964.
Civil Rights 1963
In a radical challenge to the concept of voter “qualification” (which in Mississippi required prospective voters to pass an arcane literacy test), the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee holds an unofficial statewide “Freedom Ballot” based on the principle of “One Man, One Vote.” Designed to demonstrate that large numbers of Blacks will vote when afforded the right to do so, the event draws more than 80,000 people, who defy white intimidation to cast ballots. The Freedom Ballot lays the foundation for the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, which will challenge the Democratic Convention in Atlantic City, NJ the next year. Generally speaking, the struggle for the vote distinguished the entire year. In Greenwood, local blacks angered over a food blockade by white officials and incensed over the repeated arrest of SNCC field secretary Sam Block stage the city’s first mass protest on the date of his trial. The protest inspires a mass meeting of 250 people, the largest to date. Soon local blacks who once feared being seen with Movement workers repeatedly brave police dogs, club-wielding cops, and economic reprisal in the attempt to register to vote. By year’s end, some 1500 African Americans have attempted to register. The local Movement burgeons, and voter registration efforts expand into surrounding Delta counties. Corresponding drives take place in Laurel, Meridian, Hattiesburg, Holly Springs, and Vicksburg. In Holmes County, farmer Hartman Turnbow is one of the first African Americans to register to vote since the end of Reconstruction. After he leads 12 others to the county registrar, Klan nightriders firebomb his house. In Sunflower County, sharecropper Fannie Lou Hamer is fired from her job and evicted from her home after she and 20 others attempt to register to vote. It sparks her lifelong commitment to the Movement. In Itta Bena, 150 blacks respond to the assassination of Medgar Evers with a memorial voter registration mass meeting which is tear-gassed by Klansmen. Singing freedom songs, the people immediately march to the town hall, where 45 are arrested, given a five-minute “trial” and sent to the Leflore County prison farm. A week later, 200 African Americans show up at the courthouse to attempt to register; many are sent to the prison farm. To dramatize the struggle for the vote, SNCC targets the all-white Democratic Primary, preparing local people to show up at the polls and demand the provisional ballots afforded citizens illegally prevented from voting. On August 6, nearly 1,000 blacks across the state cast provisional ballots.
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Flyer for “Freedom Vote� campaign sponsored by the Council of Federated Organizations under the presidency of Aaron Henry, 1963.
Notes
November Malcolm X Speech: Message to the Grass Roots
Notes Voices of a People’s History is the companion volume to Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States. For Voices, Zinn and Arnove have selected testimonies to living history—speeches, letters, poems, songs—left by the people who make history happen but who usually are left out of history books. Zinn has written short introductions to the texts, which range in length from letters or poems of less than a page to entire speeches and essays that run several pages. Voices of a People’s History is a symphony of our nation’s original voices,
rich in ideas and actions, the embodiment of the power of civil disobedience and dissent wherein lies our nation’s true spirit of defiance and resilience. Here in their own words are Frederick Douglass, George Jackson, Chief Joseph, Martin Luther King Jr., Plough Jogger, Sacco and Vanzetti, Patti Smith, Bruce Springsteen, Mark Twain, Paul Robeson, Cesar Chavez, Leonard Peltier, June Jordan, Walter Mosley, Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, Yolanda Huet-Vaughn, and Malcolm X, to
name just a few of the hundreds of voices that appear in Voices of a People’s History of the United States, edited by Howard Zinn and Anthony Arnove.
Civil Rights 1963
On November 10, 1963, Malcolm X delivered what is considered by many to be one of the most important speeches of the 20th century, “Message to the Grass Roots,” at the Northern Negro Grass Roots Leadership Conference in Detroit. You can listen to Mos Def read an excerpt from the speech in a Voices of a People’s History of the United States recording.
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Malcolm X selling newspapers, ca., 1962-1963
Notes
November John F. Kennedy’s assassination
Notes The Civil Rights Act of 1964, which ended segregation in public places and banned employment discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex or national origin, is considered one of the crowning legislative achievements of the civil rights movement. First proposed by President John F. Kennedy, it survived strong opposition from southern members of Congress and was then signed into law by Kennedy’s successor, Lyndon B. Johnson. In subsequent years, Congress expanded the act and passed
additional civil rights legislation such as the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
Civil Rights 1963
On November 22, 1963 President John F. Kennedy was assassinated while traveling through Dallas, Texas, in a presidential motorcade. Shortly after the shooting, Lee Harvey Oswald was apprehended and charged with the president's murder. Kennedy's assassination threatened to slow the growing momentum of the Civil Rights movement. While the first years of his presidency were largely overshadowed by the Cold War, President Kennedy publicly committed his administration to the cause of racial equality in the summer of 1963 when he proposed a Civil Rights bill to Congress and offered his endorsement to the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. Kennedy's successor, Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act into law on July 2, 1964.
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Secret Service agent Clint Hill rushes to assist a distressed Jackie Kennedy moments after John F. Kennedy’s assassination in Dealey Plaza, Dallas, Texas, 1963
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