The Black Freedom Struggle

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The Black Freedom Struggle

• Origins
• Nonviolent direct action
• A Reluctant Government Responds
• Race in the North
• Black power and
• urban uprisings

Selma, 1965
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The South
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Origins of the Black Freedom Struggle

• The World War II Experience
• The March on Washington Movement
• African American veterans
• Mexican American veterans
• and the GI Forum
• African American migration
• Pressures on the Truman
• Administration

A. Phillip Randolph
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Origins the impact of the Cold War

• hostile reaction to racial oppression in the
  U.S. among normally friendly peoples is growing
  in alarming proportions, endangering our moral
  leadership of the free and democratic nations of
  the world.
• Dean Acheson

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Origins

• The NAACPs legal strategy
• Brown v. Topeka Board of Education, 1954 and the
  struggle over compliance

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The Montgomery Bus Boycott, 1955-56

• Antecedents
• Ordinary people Parks, Nixon, Robinson

• The rise of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the SCLC

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Non-Violent Direct Action

• Roots in Christianity and in the ideas of Mahatma
  Ghandi
• Persuasion through
• Nonviolence
• Non-cooperation
• Civil Disobedience

• Non-cooperation with evil is as much a moral
  obligation as is cooperation with good.

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• We will match your capacity to inflict suffering
  with our capacity to endure suffering. We will
  meet your physical force with soul force. We
  will not hate you, but we cannot in all good
  conscience obey your unjust laws. . . .We will
  soon wear you down by our capacity to suffer.
  And in winning our freedom, we will so appeal to
  your heart and
• conscience that we will
• win you in the process.

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The beginning of nonviolent resistance
Greensboro, NC, 1960
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CORE and the Freedom Rides
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• James Meredith integrates the University of
  Mississippi, 1962
• Birmingham, 1963
• March on Washington, 1963
• Mississippi Freedom Democratic movement, 1964
• Selma-Montgomery march for voting rights, 1965

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Birmingham 1963
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A Reluctant Government Responds

• Civil Rights Act of 1964
• Public accommodations
• Education
• Employment
• Extended to ban sex discrimination
• Voting Rights Act of 1965
• Executive order affecting companies with federal
  contracts non-discrimination and affirmative
  action, 1965
• Civil Rights Act of 1968

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The Government Responds
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. . . and fails to respond

• Protection of protesters
• Democratic Party and the Mississippi Freedom
  Democratic Party, 1964
• Economic Deprivation and the Limitations of the
  War on Poverty

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Race in the North Carl Stokes and Cleveland
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Black Power

• This is the twenty-seventh time I have been
  arrested, and I aint going to jail no more. The
  only way we gonna stop them white man from
  whuppin us is to take over. We been saying
  freedom for six years--and we aint got nothin.
  What we gonna start saying now is Black Power.
• Stokely Carmichael, during the March against
  Fear, Mississippi, 1966

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Black Power

• Pride in African American culture
• Separatism
• Black autonomy and enterprise
• Self-defense

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Black Power

• Pittsburgh Courier How great can the American
  Negro become in self esteem and personal dignity
  if his history and culture are lost, both to him
  and to his white colleagues?

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African American Frustration

• Desegregation and voting rights in the South, but
• Resistance to demands for civil rights in the
  North jobs, housing, schools
• Urban uprisings

Newark, 1967 Watts, 1965
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Urban Rebellions

• I felt invincible. . . .Honestly, that is how
  powerful I felt. Im not too proud of what I
  did, looking back. But I held nothing back. I
  let out all my frustrations with every brick,
  every bottle that I threw. . .I remembered
  feeling completely relieved. I unleashed all the
  emotions that had built up inside, ones I didnt
  know how to express. urban youth

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Urban Rebellions

• 1965 Watts
• 1966 43 riots
• 1967 167 riots
• 1968 violence in 168 cities after murder of
  King 46 dead 15,000 troops patrol the streets
  of Washington, D.C.
• 1965-68 250 dead 8,000 wounded 50,000
  arrested in nearly 300 race riots.

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1967 Detroit Riot
43 dead, 2000 injured, 5000 homeless, 500
million in property damage.
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The Black Freedom Struggle

• Ordinary people risk everything, force
  governments to act
• The end of legal segregation and discrimination
• Overt racism no longer seen as legitimate,
  yet
• Subtle racism
• Economic deprivation persists