Steven F. Lawson

"Of course, Washington alone cannot supply all the answers. As was the case during the civil rights movement, African Americans must mobilize to achieve their won freedom. The federal government made racial reform possible, but Blacks in the South made it necessary. Had they not mobilized their neighbors, opened their churches to stage protests and sustained the spirits of the demonstrators, and rallied the faithful to provoke a response from the federal government, far less would have been made. Thus, the real heroes of the civil rights struggle were the Black foot soldiers and their white allies who directly put their lives on the line in the face of often overwhelming odds against them. Federal officials were not heroes, for they usually calculated the political consequences of their actions too closely. Yet if not heroes, they proved essential for allowing the truly courageous to succeed." (p. 42)

Lawson argues that national leadership was essential for the success of the Civil Rights Movement. Key actors included the Presidency, the Supreme Court, Black national leadership provided by people like MLK and black organizations (NAACP, SCLC, SNCC). Finding the origins of the Movement in WWII, Lawson describes the initial steps toward first class African-American citizenship in "President Franklin D. Roosevelt and World War II." Under the threat of a March on Washington from A. Philip Randolph, FDR issued an executive order to desegregate war industry and to set up the Fair Employment Practice Committee (FEPC). The Supreme Court ruled in 1944 in Smith v Allwright that all-white primary was unconstitutional. This set the pattern for future Civil Rights action at the national level. Presidential action prodded by African-American organizations, the work of the federal government, along with Supreme Court rulings.

With FDR's death, Harry Truman assumed the Presidency and continued the slow movement toward first class citizenship for African Americans. In "The Postwar South and President Harry S. Truman," Lawson explains that Truman was personally repelled by anti-black violence in the South and moved to set up the President's Committee on Civil Rights, which issued a report in 1947 entitled "To Secure These Rights." In this report we see the liberal agenda for civil rights for the next two decades:

Desegregation of the Armed Forces, interstate transportation, and government employment
Cessation of federal aid to segregated institutions
Measures to challenge lynching and voting discrimination
Legislation to resurrect the FEPC
The creation of a Civil Rights Division in the Department of Justice
Establishment of a permanent Civil Rights Commission
White Southern resistance in the Senate killed most of Truman's legislative proposals, but he did issue an executive order to desegregate the armed forces.

"The Impact of the Cold War" was to expose the US to criticism abroad for failing to live up to its own principles. In the context of a "Red Scare" in which ideas deemed controversial were suspect, Southern whites accused those advocating African-American equality of "subversion" and attempted to smear them. The defeat of CIO unionizing attempts by exactly these tactics ensured that the labor union would be consigned to the periphery of the Civil Rights Movement. Even the NAACP, which expelled all of its communist members, was "red baited."

In "The Supreme Court and School Desegregation," Lawson describes how the agitation by NAACP lawyers for equality of education lead through a number of court cases to the Brown decision in 1954. Chief Justice Earl Warren, speaking for the majority, declared the doctrine of "separate but equal" dead in education and ordered communities to desegregate their school systems with "all due speed." This ruling provoked "Massive Resistance" from White Southerners, who issued a Southern Manifesto in Congress. IN Mississippi, the brutal murder of Emmett Till was a highly visible symbol of this resistance. His murders were acquitted by an all-white jury.

A political gradualist by temperament, "President Dwight D. Eisenhower" refused to enforce the Brown decision with any real conviction. He was not inclined to push a measure that he knew would inflame the South. Instead he advocated Black voting rights, which he believed would solve many of the problems Blacks faced. "The Montgomery Bus Boycott," which occurred from December of 1955 to November of 1956 brought the Supreme Court to uphold the illegality of government-sponsored bus segregation -- and it brought to national prominence a 26 year old minister named Martin Luther King, Jr. As the director of the Montgomery Improvement Association, King made his first foray into the national limelight.

"The Civil Rights Act of 1957" emerged as a limited compromise effort which had the support of Lyndon B Johnson in the Senate. Focusing on voting rights and steering clear of the inflammatory school desegregation issue, it established the Civil Rights Division in the Justice Department and the federal Civil Rights Commission, yet it did not call for federal registrars to ensure voting rights in the South.

Despite his attempts to avoid a showdown between federal and state authority in the South, Ike would have to face a direct challenge to Presidential authority in 1957 "Little Rock." Resisting a federal court order to allow black students to attend Central High School, Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus activated the Arkansas National Guard to prevent 9 students from entering the school Under pressure from Eisenhower, the National Guard withdrew and the situation disintegrated into anarchy. Only then did Ike send in the 101st Airborne Division. The federal government would act, but only when there was no other way to maintain public order in a manner consistent with federal law. "Martin Luther King, Jr." formed the SCLC in the same year as the political arm of the African-American Church in the South. Advocating direct action in non-violent opposition to Jim Crow, SCLC efforts bore little fruit in the 1950s.

The 1960s began with "Student Activism" at its center. Four students at UNC Greensboro held a sit in a the local Woolworth's lunch counter. The protest drew national attention and out of it grew a nation-wide sit in movement. Around the success of this movement, student activists formed SNCC. As Lawson points out, the leadership of Ella Baker was crucial to the formation of this group and it was the success this group had in convincing Reverend King to put himself on the line by attempting to be served in an Atlanta restaurant that drew national attention to his imprisonment. During the last days of the election of 1960, the Kennedy's intervention on behalf of King lead to his release and helped swing the black vote into the Kennedy camp. Kennedy won the presidency with a 1 % margin and the "suitcase full of votes" that Daddy King delivered on election day in gratitude for this kindness were crucial in composing that margin.

Despite this key swing vote, "The Kennedy Administration" proved reticent during its first two years to pursue a vigorous course on Civil Rights. With Bobby Kennedy at Justice, the Kennedy's pursued a course of submitting local suits to challenge violations of the 1957 Civil Rights Act. Yet the Kennedys' efforts to use the court system to foster Black voting rights was undermined by their own appointment of racist segregationist judges to federal benches in the South. Intimidated by the political power of key Southern Congressmen, Kennedy took two years to issue the executive order which he had claimed during the campaign would illuminate discrimination in federally funded housing "by the stroke of a pen."

The 1961 "Freedom Rides" took place within a Cold War context that explains, though does not excuse, the timidity with which the Kennedy administration acted to enforce the desegregation ruling of the Supreme Court for interstate transportation. To provoke the government to act, CORE sent 13 black and white riders on busses from Washington, D.C. to New Orleans. Insisting on eating where they pleased in bus terminals and riding in integrated fashion, the CORE riders provoked the wrath of Southern racists. In Alabama, the riders were attacked and one of the buses firebombed on Mother's Day. Robert Kenned negotiated furiously with Governor John Patterson in Alabama as Jack Kennedy prepared to meet with Nikita Khrushchev. On the verge of sending in federal forces the Kennedys wavered, fearing the public spectacle this would create. Not until one of the administration's own Justice Department staff was badly beaten in Montgomery, did the Kennedys send in federal marshals. Convinced that they had made their point in Alabama, Robert Kennedy became fed up with the "Freedom Riders" when they insisted on continuing on to Mississippi. Goaded to further action he finally agreed to have the ICC issue regulations to implement the court's ruling. The lesson of the "Freedom Rides" was that the federal government could be moved to act through non-violent protest.

"The Albany, Georgia, Campaign" of 1961-1962 produced few results for the civil rights movement. Initiated as a challenge to the state's segregation laws, foot soldiers of the movement (as well as Martin Luther King, Jr.) were jailed. Albany police chief Laurie Pritchett, however, did not brutalize the black protesters in the kind of public way that Bull Connor would later in Birmingham. The segregationist federal judge in Georgia (appointed by Kennedy) issued injunctions against the marches. The Kennedy administration remained largely silent, managing to keep this a "local" matter. The Albany Movement went nowhere. King seems to have learned the lesson from this movement that a clear-cut confrontation was necessary to draw in the national limelight and force the federal government's hand. Frustrated with FBI inaction, King made the mistake of criticizing the bureau in the press. (This had the unfortunate effect of making King an enemy of the FBI. From this point on, J Edgar Hoover considered King an enemy and worked behind the scenes to damage him -- going so far as delivering evidence of King's extramarital affairs to his wife Coretta. Later, when the FBI learned of threats to King's life they remained silent.)

"Voter Registration" was the Kennedy Administration's preferred method of encouraging civil rights. To this end they supported the creation of the Voter Education Project (VEP), a non-profit organization in Atlanta which was established to extend voting rights to disfranchised Blacks in the South. NAACP, CORE, SCLC, SNCC all joined VEP with tacit assurances that the Kennedy's would extend federal protection to support the voting rights they were encouraging. The Kennedys reacted in a highly legalistic manner to flagrant abuses by local law enforcement. In places like the rural McComb, Mississippi local sheriffs and police denied the franchise to Blacks, using violent intimidation tactics on local blacks and civil rights workers. Federal protection was not forthcoming until the NAACP succeeded in getting James Meredith admitted to the University of Mississippi in 1962. Governor Ross Barnett's political maneuvering to delay Meredith's registration that Fall enabled the total breakdown of law and order. This time marshals provide unequal to the task of maintaining order, and the Kennedys sent in federal troops. Ole Miss brought in the power of the law behind the civil rights movement because it lead to the breakdown of public order and thereby exceeded the Kennedy administration's threshold for political pain. This was a valuable lesson.

In April and May of 1963, King turned his focus on "Birmingham." Here was a foe that would be just stupid enough to unleash the full force of racial hatred on the movement if provoked. And that is exactly what Eugene "Bull" Connor did, turning police dogs and fire hoses on peaceful marchers while the national news media captured the horror for the television audience. It was especially appalling when children who marched were attacked by police dogs. Under the intense limelight of public scrutiny, the Justice Department negotiated the desegregation of restaurants and increased Black employment opportunities. Yet the level of racial hatred stirred in the process lead to the firebombing of a Birmingham Church, were four black girls were killed.

The impact of this growing public violence seems to have moved the Kennedys to act more decisively. Governor George Wallace's symbolic stand in the door at the University of Alabama did not stop the administration from securing the registration of black students through the presence of federal marshals. Appearing on television on the night of June 11, 1963, for the first time JFK cast first class citizenship for African Americans as a "moral" issue. Hours later, Medgar Evars was gunned down by a sniper outside his home in Jackson, Mississippi. Kennedy then submitted bill to congress that would become the "The 1964 Civil Rights Act." Though he held back on proposing the creation of an EEOC, it was the most sweeping civil rights legislation since Reconstruction. With this bill in the Congress, A. Philip Randolph of the NAACP reinitiated his plan for the march on Washington. This time, after furious negotiations with the Kennedy administration, the march took place on August 28 at which MLK delivered his "I Have A Dream" speech. When JFK was killed on November 22, the bill was stalled in Congress.

It remained for the former "Master of the Senate," Lyndon Baines Johnson, to secure passage of the Civil Rights Bill -- a task which he took up with the full power of his new office. As the President maneuvered to enact this legacy of the final months of the Kennedy Presidency, civil rights workers organized COFO and sent 600-700 white college students from middle class backgrounds in the north to run freedom schools and voter registration drives in the state of Mississippi in what became known as the Mississippi Freedom Summer. The legacy of "President Lyndon B. Johnson and Freedom Summer" is a mixed one. Knowing that the violence against blacks in the South largely went unnoticed, CORE reasoned that violence directed at white college kids would bring the nation's attention to Mississippi. This is did. The very beginning of the Freedom Summer was marked by the murder of three activists (James Cheney, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman) by the Klan. LBJ directed the FBI to investigate the killings and as a result the FBI infiltrated and damaged the Klan severely in Mississippi. But another result of the Freedom Summer was less positive for the Johnson agenda. The Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) grew out of the summer and mounted a challenge to the white Democratic delegation to the Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City, NJ. Johnson used the FBI to eavesdrop on the MFDP at Atlantic City and using the knowledge gained thereby was able to broker a compromise that did not alienate the Southern white delegates. MFDP delegate's testimony, especially from Fannie Lou Hamer, was damaging to LBJ's image and established a pattern of confrontation between the left of the civil rights movement and the liberalism of LBJ that would be repeated in various ways over the next several years.

In discussing "Selma and the 1965 Voting Rights Act," Lawson shows how the march from Selma to Montgomery in March of 1965 allowed King and his movement to bring national attention to the issues of black disfranchisement. Attacked by a mob along the way, the marchers were forced to regroup and attempt the march again. When Governor George Wallace failed to protect the marchers, LBJ sent in federal troops. In the midst of this struggle a white housewife from Detroit (Vila Liuzzo) was shot and killed. Johnson went on national television to announce his voting rights bill. Bringing all of the power of his office to bear he secured the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 which had an immediate impact on voting by striking down literacy tests and moving the Justice Department to challenge the poll tax in the courts. The Act even allowed the Justice Department to send in federal registrars to ensure that blacks could register. The 1965 Voting Rights Act inaugurated a new phase in the African American "Run for Freedom," which began in the midst of WWII and extends until today. Using the power of the ballot, African Americans began to turn increasingly to the ballot to put representatives in congress (Tennessee, Texas and Georgia) and mayors in city halls (Atlanta, Birmingham and New Orleans).

1965 also saw the increasing polarization of the African American community in its reaction to "Black Power" advocates in CORE and SNCC. While the President worked for change with conservative Black groups like the National Urban League (NUL) and the NAACP, Black Power advocates like SNCC's Stoakley Carmichael urged separatist strategies for Black empowerment. SNCC and CORE broke with Johnson over his stand on the MFDP and increasingly on the issue of the war in Vietnam. Though King was not an advocate of "Black Power," he too moved further to the left as he moved north to bring his non-violent protest movement to bear in marches against the conditions in the slums of Chicago. In "President Johnson Pushes Racial Moderation," Lawson explains how LBJ maneuvered to strengthen the moderate forces in the Civil Rights Movement by undermining the power of left leaning and more radical elements. Once again Mississippi took center stage as LBJ worked with Senator John Stennis (who coincidently supported LBJ on Vietnam) to get Head Start funding moved from the MFDP-supported Child Development Group of Mississippi (CDGM) to the more moderate and interracial Mississippi Action for Progress (MAP). Thus did the War on Poverty become a vehicle for liberal support of racial integration over Black Power calls for separatism and nationalism.

"Race Riots" were met by "Federal Repression." With the pressure of black power advocates focusing increasingly on the economic (as opposed to political) forces at work in the north, race riots broke out in Detroit and Newark in 1967. Federal troops were sent in to restore order. The Kerner Commission issued a report blaming white racism for the riots, and LBJ -- hurt by the ingratitude of the people he had done so much to help -- let loose the forces of the FBI in COINTELPRO to infiltrate and destroy the "Black Power" movement. King too was subject to increasing surveillance and smear campaigns by the FBI, with J. Edger Hoover's enmity having grown ever stronger since the criticism of the bureau by king during the Albany Movement.

In assessing the "Legacy of the Civil Rights Movement and Affirmative Action," Lawson points out that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 had established the EEOC, which stood at the heart of a federal bureaucracy which pursued discrimination as a group phenomenon rather than an individual grievance. If a particular employer did not provide a proportion of employment opportunities to Blacks (and women) that reflected their makeup in the larger population, that employer was judged to be in violation of federal protections. This apportionment of quotas became known as Affirmative Action. With appeals to the rugged individualism that is the enduring legacy of the yeoman farmer ideal, presidents from Nixon to Reagan (and now George W. Bush) lead the conservative counterattack. "The Role of the National Government" was crucial even after the end of the Civil Rights Movement in the late 1960s. Justice and the EEOC continued to enforce the laws and legal judgments that protected first class citizenship for African Americans. But the ensuing fight over civil rights will certainly witness at least some of the same dynamic we have seen since America's Right Turn in 1968.

Debating the Civil Rights Movement: The View From the Trenches by Charles Payne

It is not an either/or choice. Scholars advocating a more bottom-up approach are not denying the critical importance of national institutions, but they are contending that traditional top-down scholarship has tended to focus on them so exclusively as to make it impossible to understand just how complex the movement really was and how varied the sources of its dynamism were. To understand that, we need more sophisticated work from a variety of perspectives. (p. 111)

Payne opens his article with caricatures of viewpoints prevalent today -- either the civil rights movement is presented as a wonderfully edifying morality play or it is seen as being totally outside the stream of history, and therefore essentially irrelevant to what we face today. Payne's project is to rescue the movement from platitudes and irrelevance. His chosen method is to show the broader context of the movement, to ground it in the lives of everyday people and to place it within the larger course of history.

In "From World War II Through the 1950s" be launches his narrative with a recounting of Howard Law School's famous President, the demanding Charles Hamilton Houston. In the 20s and 30s his institution produced the attorneys (Thurgood Marshall for example) who would plead the important case before the court. We know, of course, that prominent figures need to be contextualized but there is even a broader context than this history of the famous would leave us with.

In the Civil Rights Movement, local people did the hard organizing work to make possible the stage onto which national leaders would step. Local People like J. A. Delaine, a school teacher and minister from Clarendon County, SC, endured attacks on their homes and families for their activism long before MLK had become a national leader. Indeed, many of the local leaders were trained in SC at Highlander Folk School, where Myles Horton and Septima Clark taught citizenship to illiterate local people in a racially integrated environment. Highlander was steeped in the tradition of radical democracy and community organizing.

The approach of these Citizenship Schools was shared by others like Ella Baker, who spent years organizing people on the local level. After a career in the NAACP, she worked for King's SCLC and then was a key advisor to the founding of SNCC. Suspicious of the ministers in the movement for their tendency to grab headlines, she was an inspiration to the students who set up SNCC.

Other strains of Black liberation struggles speak to the movement across the divide of time. During WWII it was A. Philip Randolph who pressured FDR to form the FEPC and to desegregate war industry. It was men like Fred Shuttlesworth in Birmingham, AL Leading the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights, successor to the NAACP which had been outlawed in Alabama, Shuttlesworth was beaten and bombed for years before taking a pulpit in the North. It was a miracle that Shuttlesworth survived the 1950s, and others were not so lucky.

None of these people are the ones most people think of when the talk of the Civil Rights Movement. But their work restores the fullness of historical interpretation and, Payne argues, transforms our understanding of what the movement was really about. A critique of the traditional narrative has grown up around a number of points:

Need to restore agency to non-elite actors
Need to escape trap of normative history
Need to restore complexity to the narrative
Need to see the longer term perspective
Need to understand the phenomenon of "Black Power"
Need to understand how the movement worked on a day to day basis
As an example of the need for re-examination of the movement's history by looking from the bottom-up, Payne offers the Montgomery Bus Boycott in 1955-6 as an example. Instead of a simple narrative of an apolitical Rosa Parks sparking a spontaneous outpouring of support from a politically naive community galvanized by the young King, he gives us a more subtle picture. In actuality, Rosa Parks had a long history of grass roots political activism with the NAACP and had recently attended a week long seminar at Highlander Folk School. E. D. Nixon (union organizer with the Pullman Porters union and president of the state NAACP), not Martin Luther King, provided the initial momentum and it was carried forward in those first hour by Jo Ann Robinson, an English professor at the local Alabama State College. This combination of actors gives us a fuller understanding of what drove the bus boycott. Parks, Nixon and Robinson built the stage that King stepped onto.

"Student Activism, Direct Action, and the Moral Dimensions of Protest" kicks off with the Greensboro lunch counter sit-ins, follows the development of the student movement through the founding of SNCC, through the CORE-sponsored and SNCC assisted Freedom Rides and onto the Albany, GA movement. It is apparent that the students had a strained, if symbiotic, relationship with King. Referring to him sardonically as "De Lawd" they resented the fact that he would step into the fray only after others had done all the back breaking groundwork. Yet they needed him to revive flagging spirits. To understand the subtleties of intra-movement conflict is gain an appreciation of the real motivating factors that moved a diverse group of people as they did. At Albany, King learned that the only way to motivate whites was through an appeal to their pocketbooks, and this was a lesson he would apply at Birmingham, hitting the merchants in the business district where it hurt most. The whites of Birmingham were indeed divided, and the merchants were involved in an attempt to restructure the city's government when the Birmingham movement drew world attention to the city. By understanding the multifarious motives, we see the complicated twists and turns trough with the movement passed, and perhaps we also gain an appreciation for what the movement was about for its many constituencies.

Shifting our focus to the most difficult of all challenges, in "Mississippi: The Middle of the Iceberg" Payne further complicates the history of the movement by showing us the brutality of the reprisals against voting rights activists in rural Mississippi, where SNCC spearheaded the voter registration drives in the early 60s. It was Ella Baker who put Bob Moses in contact with Amzie Moore in rural Mississippi. With his history of leadership in the NAACP, Moore represented that older generation of black freedom fighters who reached out to Moses' younger generation in offering support, protection and an education in the history of the movement. Before moving on to the Delta, Bob Moses paid his dues in McComb. Jailed and beaten for his efforts to register local blacks, Moses suffered the further indignity of having the Kennedy administration hide behind legalistic justifications for not protecting the voters of McComb. Least we see the local people of rural Mississippi as simply victims, Payne is quick to remind us that many of them were armed and shot back at whites. Non-violence was hardly a universal response to white supremacist violence. An examination of the Mississippi experience also makes clear that it was working people, as opposed to the black middle class of preachers and teachers, who put it on the line for freedom. And it is also apparent that women played a huge role in the movement. By looking at the local level and putting organization as opposed to mobilization at the heart of our narrative, a different picture emerges of the black freedom struggle. After the murder of Louis Allen, the one witness who could testify in the murder of a local black farmer Herbert Lee, the workers of CORE and SNCC realized that they had to get white people to put themselves in harm's way if the movement was to draw national attention. Hence the idea to get white middle class college kids involved in the Mississippi Freedom Summer. There is a good deal of hypocrisy that becomes evident when one considers that the murders of Cheney, Goodman and Schwerner only got the attention they did because the kids of well of northern white families were in the fray now. By the time whites got to the point in 1966 that they could value the life of Vernon Dahmer enough for his funeral to attract an outpouring of sympathy from whites, the progress of black consciousness had outpaced the show of solidarity. In a few short years, Blacks had gone from agitation to "Black Power."

In "Looking Back: Historical Language and Historical Memory," Payne challenges us to see the language we use to describe the movement is ladened with a certain historical interpretation. By calling the movement a movement for "civil rights" against "segregation," we are accepting the interpretation of white liberals of the time. With this frame of reference, the "Black Power" movement of the later 60s becomes unintelligible. Why would Blacks degenerate into a fit of nationalist pride just at the moment when equality before the law had been secured? If we see the movement as a movement against white supremacy, then the "Black Power" movement becomes more intelligible. Unfreezing King from the moment in time when he delivered the "I Have a Dream Speech," and looking at the last year of his life, we see that he had become aware of the broader impact of racism in the north. The economic aspects of racism in the ghettos of the north cried out for more than mere legal equality. Attacking the structural inequalities in the economic system would require a much more radical approach to the movement than the slogans of civil rights would encompass. As King came out against the Vietnam war and brought the protest movement to the ghettos of the north, he moved closer to a vision of the last years of Malcolm X and closer to social democracy. This vision has largely been lost to the public view, buried beneath a thousand MLK day memorial speeches and banal celebrations of a martyred hero to American democracy. Recovering the complexity of King's thought might allow us today to find hope for the future of the movement. for the problems of race are still with us.… (mehr)