Political Parties From Reconstruction-Civil Rights

[phoenix]

PART I:

the Civil Rights Movement
http://www.africana.com/research/encarta/civil.asp

The Civil Rights Movement secured the enactment of national civil rights legislation, elevated black consciousness and racial pride, and contributed to the transformation of American social, cultural, and political life in the latter decades of the twentieth century.

Origins: The Reconstruction Era, 1865 to 1890s
The Civil Rights Movement had its roots in the constitutional amendments enacted during the Reconstruction era. The Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery, the Fourteenth Amendment expanded the guarantees of federally-protected citizenship rights, and the Fifteenth Amendment barred voting restrictions based on race.

Reconstruction radically altered social, political, and economic relationships in the South and in the nation. Former slaves participated in civic and political life throughout the South. Black elected officials served at all levels of government, from local offices to state legislatures and the United States Congress. During the early days of Reconstruction, state governments drew up new constitutions that implemented sweeping democratic reforms, including, for the first time in the South, a system of universal free public education.

Yet the meaning of freedom was vigorously contested in private and public life to the end of the century. Newly enfranchised blacks understood citizenship to embody constitutionally protected rights, realized through political participation and ultimately secured by the federal government. They acted upon an expansive view of the democratic process through their participation in Republican Party politics and by exploring alliances with independent groups and, in some cases, the Democratic Party as well.

This vision competed with the Democratic Party's politics of "redemption," which promised the restoration of white hegemony and "home rule" for Southern states. As Democrats regained control of state governments throughout the South, the Ku Klux Klan and other vigilante groups sought to drive blacks from political life through a relentless campaign of fraud and violence. Black men continued to vote in large numbers, often going to the polls in groups, accompanied by family members.

By the late nineteenth century, however, reconciliation between the North and the South was nearly complete, and popular "scientific" theories about race favored white supremacist views. State governments controlled by Democrats drew up new constitutions and enacted a variety of laws that dramatically restricted suffrage in the South, virtually barring blacks from voting and vastly reducing the scope of government. A combination of municipal ordinances and local and state laws mandating racial segregation ultimately permeated all spheres of public life. The Supreme Court, in rulings such as Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), upheld the South's "new order," which essentially nullified the constitutional amendments enacted during Reconstruction.

Black Protest During the Age of Jim Crow, 1900 to 1930s
By the dawn of the new century, government and politics had become, as one historian observed, "inaccessible and unaccountable to Americans who happened to be black." While the rudiments of citizenship expired, black protest against new laws segregating streetcars spontaneously erupted in locally organized boycotts in at least 25 Southern cities from 1900 to 1906. Some boycotts lasted as long as two years, but these protests failed to stem the tide of segregation. Meanwhile, lynching and other forms of antiblack violence and terrorism reinforced legal structures of white domination.

Black leaders and intellectuals continued to debate a broad range of political strategies. There was, for example, the accommodationism and self-help advanced by Booker T. Washington and others, the civil rights protests advocated by Ida B. Wells and W. E. B. Du Bois, and the nationalist and emigration movements promoted by leaders such as Henry McNeal Turner. These overlapping and sometimes contradictory approaches revealed the tensions and challenges inherent in what often was a daunting effort: how to build and sustain black communities amid the crushing environment of white racism while envisioning a way forward.

Yet traditions of freedom and citizenship, born in the crucible of Reconstruction, nurtured communities of resistance. African Americans continued to create strategies for social and political development through a separate public sphere. Black community life was dominated in large part by the church and shaped by other institutions such as fraternal organizations, schools, and newspapers. The black church focused the mobilization of community resources to provide educational and welfare services, leadership training, and organizational networks and served as a site of mass gatherings and meetings - a place, as Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham has written, "to critique and contest America's racial domination."

The NAACP, World War I, and the "New Negro"
In 1905 W. E. B. Du Bois, William Monroe Trotter (1872-1934), and other black militants founded the Niagara Movement, an organization committed to securing full citizenship rights for African Americans. The Niagara Movement was short-lived but its goals were adopted by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), founded in New York in 1909 by an interracial group of reformers and civil rights activists. White progressives dominated the early leadership of the NAACP. But the NAACP provided the primary organizational and institutional foundation from which the black struggle for civil rights was mounted over the next half century.


World War I and the Great Migration altered the political and social landscape of black America. Beginning in 1914, wartime industrial opportunities in the North sparked a massive movement of nearly 1.5 million black Southerners to Northern urban centers, a migration that continued through the 1920s. While racial discrimination and segregation restricted black opportunities in the North, black community life flourished in Northern cities, where African Americans enjoyed free access to the ballot. As their numbers increased, the black vote in the urban North gradually became a factor of national consequence.

The participation of African Americans in World War I, the war that promised to "make the world safe for democracy," stirred the aspirations of a new generation determined to "make democracy safe for the Negro." Returning veterans formed organizations such as the League for Democracy, which advocated political activism and self-defense, and joined in establishing new branches of the NAACP throughout the South. Others, like Charles Hamilton Houston, enrolled in law school, determined to fight racial injustice through the courts.

Whites responded with a campaign of antiblack violence that erupted in a series of lynchings and more than 25 race riots throughout the country during the summer of 1919. The worst riot was in Chicago. In many instances blacks fought back, in the spirit of Claude McKay's defiant poem "If We Must Die." Yet state repression, supported by federal surveillance, effectively quashed the incipient democratic political initiatives spawned by the war.

[phoenix]

Part II

During the 1920s the "New Negro" movement stretched the parameters of racial consciousness and expression. Urban communities nurtured the outpouring of black cultural, literary, and musical creativity that flowered in the Harlem Renaissance. Beyond the literary salons and art galleries, Marcus Garvey and his Universal Negro Improvement Association represented the largest mass black organization in the United States, one that promoted black economic development and celebrated Africa and racial pride. While W. E. B. Du Bois and some others dismissed Garvey as little more than a fool, Charles Houston contended that Garvey surpassed most race leaders of his time, for he had "made a permanent contribution in teaching the simple dignity of being black."
Despite cultural and economic changes ushered in by migration and urbanization, the status of African Americans remained largely unchanged. Some 80 percent of African Americans still lived in the Southern United States in 1930, where they were racially segregated, politically disenfranchised, and economically marginalized. The fate of nine young black men in the Scottsboro case of 1931 focused national and international attention on the fact that blacks in the South were completely beyond the protection of the law.

Charles Houston and the Legal Campaign for Civil Rights
With the normal channels of political participation closed to the vast majority of black Americans, Charles Houston envisioned a unique role for black lawyers as "social engineers," prepared to "anticipate, guide, and interpret his group's advancement." Houston, a graduate of Harvard Law School, joined the faculty of Howard University Law School in 1924. He transformed Howard into a laboratory for the development of civil rights law and trained a generation of black lawyers to lead the assault on Jim Crow.
When Houston became chief legal counsel of the NAACP in the early 1930s, he and former student Thurgood Marshall began laying the groundwork for a protracted campaign against racial discrimination in education. For Houston and Marshall, litigation was a slow and deliberate process, tied to the development of community support and participation. Houston and Marshall traveled as much as 10,000 mi a year through the South, where they met with small and large groups, explaining the mechanics of the legal fight and its relationship to broader community concerns.
An associate recalled that Houston's efforts in the South were fueled by his confidence in the capacity "within the black community and the Negro race to bring about change." During the 1930s Houston and Marshall implemented a major reorientation of the NAACP's program, focusing staff efforts on the expansion of black membership and the cultivation of local leadership and branches, especially in the South. In 1934 Houston wrote Walter White, then executive secretary of the NAACP: "The work of the next decade will have to be concentrated in the South."
The New Deal and the World War II Era
While the South was the primary arena of the black freedom struggle, the nationalizing trends of the New Deal and World War II enhanced the possibilities for a broad legal and political challenge to the segregation system and made civil rights an issue of consequence throughout the country.
The 1932 presidential election of Franklin D. Roosevelt in the depths of the Great Depression precipitated a sea change in American politics. New Deal programs and legislation expanded the scope of federal power and redefined the role of government and politics in American life. Government relief and job programs, along with the legalization of labor unions, stirred the expectations of groups long on the margins of national politics - industrial workers, sharecroppers, and African Americans of all classes.
When Roosevelt was inaugurated in 1933, racial segregation reigned in the city of Washington and in the corridors of government. The Republican Party offered no more than token representation to black Americans, and white Southerners dominated the Democratic Party. During the 1920s the NAACP had carved out a presence in the nation's capital through its efforts to gain support for antilynching legislation; in 1930 an NAACP lobbying campaign had helped defeat the nomination of John J. Parker, a white Southern conservative, to the Supreme Court. But there were no secure avenues through which African Americans could influence or shape government policy.
The implementation of a national recovery program, however, promised to have immediate and long-term consequences for black Americans. As more established black leaders deliberated about how to respond to the flurry of New Deal legislation, Robert C. Weaver, a doctoral student at Harvard, and John P. Davis (1905-1973), a new graduate of Harvard Law School, acted to ensure that black interests were represented. In the summer of 1933 the two men returned to their hometown of Washington and established an office on Capitol Hill, where they fought successfully against the racial wage differential in the first recovery program. Their efforts led to the establishment of the Joint Committee on Economic Recovery, a group of more than a dozen black organizations that included the NAACP and the National Urban League (NUL). The committee lobbied for fair inclusion of African Americans in government-sponsored programs and publicized incidents and patterns of racial discrimination.
The NAACP and the black press, along with the Rosenwald Fund, successfully pressed for the appointment of black government officials to represent black interests from within the Roosevelt administration. Robert Weaver and William Hastie were among the first African Americans hired. Shortly after joining the Interior Department they integrated the lunchroom, sparking the reversal of the segregationist policies enacted by Woodrow Wilson. By 1935 black advisers were serving in many cabinet offices and New Deal agencies and had created an informal network commonly known as the Black Cabinet.
Southern Blacks and the New Deal
The Democratic rhetoric of the New Deal, along with federal programs, dovetailed with the NAACP's expanded activity in the South, the growth of industrial unionism in the region, and pockets of student and Communist Party activism. Together, these developments revived the expansive view of citizenship and politics that had informed black and biracial politics in the Reconstruction era.
Despite their conservative nature, early New Deal programs stirred the stagnant economic relationships that had persisted in the South since the 1890s. Federal work relief and credit, along with federal legislation securing the rights of labor to unionize, implicitly threatened the culture of dependency that shaped race and class relations in the South. New Deal initiatives combined with the organizing efforts of a revitalized NAACP and radical labor groups - such as the International Labor Defense - to support a renewed interest in politics on the part of the South's disenfranchised.
Early in 1934 a South Carolina peach grower complained that black women would not work in the fields while their husbands had jobs with the federal Civil Works Administration. In Arkansas black and white sharecroppers organized the Southern Tenant Farmers Union to demand federal enforcement of guarantees provided by the New Deal's Agricultural Adjustment Administration. Organized groups of black citizens in Georgia and South Carolina attempted to vote in the Democratic primary that barred blacks in 1934, seeking entry into Roosevelt's party. Peter Epps, an administrator for the Works Progress Administration in South Carolina, told an interviewer that blacks "talked more politics since Mister Roosevelt's been in than ever before."
Contemplating the impact of recent federal programs on black political consciousness, W. E. B. Du Bois noted that the government was attending to economic matters and furnishing jobs and food in the provincial South. The question bound to arise was, "How can this political instrument which is the federal government be used more widely and efficiently for the well-being of the mass of people?"
New Deal Political Coalitions: Blacks, Labor, and the Democratic Party The 1936 Election
While blacks were essentially barred from voting in the South, black voters in the North emerged as a pivotal group in the 1936 presidential campaign. Following a steady stream of migrations from the South during the 1920s, blacks in the North came to cast significant numbers of votes in key industrial states. They had been drifting away from the party of Lincoln, establishing a tentative allegiance to the Roosevelt administration. Yet Roosevelt's party was also the party of Southern segregationists.

While the Roosevelt administration had failed to endorse racially sensitive legislation, such as an antilynching bill, it made other gestures that appealed to black voters. Roosevelt presided over a Democratic National Convention that, for the first time, opened its doors to the equal participation of black reporters and the handful of black delegates in attendance, drawing a howl of protest from Southern delegates. Mary McLeod Bethune and other members of the Black Cabinet took part in a sophisticated campaign aimed at black voters. It included an extravagant multi-city celebration of the 73rd anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation. Such actions reinforced the bonds woven by New Deal relief and jobs, ensuring Roosevelt's sweep of the black vote. "The amazing switch of this great group of voters is the real political sensation of the time," wrote a national political analyst.
The basis of Roosevelt's landslide victory in 1936 was a broad, class-based appeal, one that pledged an activist federal government committed to the "establishment of a democracy of opportunity for all people." African Americans, urban ethnic groups, industrial workers, and farmers responded, creating a new Democratic coalition that eclipsed the singular dominance of old-line Southern Democrats. For the next three decades the Democratic Party was a major site of the struggle waged to define a national policy on civil rights.

[phoenix]

PART III

Race and the Politics of New Deal Reform
The late 1930s and the early 1940s witnessed the emergence of new organizations that were dedicated to expanding economic and political democracy in the South and were prepared to challenge Jim Crow laws. In 1937 a group of black students established the Southern Negro Youth Congress (SNYC) in Richmond, Virginia, dedicated to organizing black industrial workers in the South. During the next decade, SNYC grew into a regional organization based in Birmingham; in addition to supporting the work of organized labor, SNYC activists sponsored voter education and registration efforts and leadership training, often through community-based cultural activities.
In 1938 Roosevelt issued the Report on the Economic Conditions of the South, which identified the region as "the Nation's number one economic problem." In response to that report several thousand black and white Southerners met in Birmingham, Alabama, in November 1938 and established the Southern Conference for Human Welfare (SCHW). At the founding of the SCHW, Birmingham police commissioner Eugene "Bull" Connor enforced segregated seating in the group's meeting hall. First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt responded by placing her chair on top of the hastily established line separating the two races. With the endorsement of the Roosevelt administration and the strong support of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), the SCHW launched a decade-long effort to expand political participation in the South.
Just weeks after Eleanor Roosevelt's dramatic gesture in Birmingham, the Supreme Court ruled that Lloyd L. Gaines be admitted to the University of Missouri Law School, giving the NAACP its first major victory in the campaign for equal education. Pauli Murray, whose application to the University of North Carolina had been rejected solely on the grounds of race, observed that Gaines was the "first major breach in the solid wall of segregated education since Plessey." It was, she wrote, "the beginning of the end."
World War II
By the late 1930s the crusading spirit of the New Deal had been obscured by mobilization for war and the increasing power of conservatives in Washington. Still, the war experience broadened the possibilities for civil rights struggles. On the eve of America's entry into the war, Osceola McKaine, a South Carolina NAACP organizer, observed: "We are living in the midst of perhaps the greatest revolution within human experience. Nothing, no nation, will be as it was when the peace comes ... There is no such thing as the status quo."
The demographic, economic, and political changes unleashed by the war had far-reaching consequences for African Americans. As scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr. has written, World War II "did more to recement black American culture, which migration had fragmented, than did any single event or experience." For the nearly 1 million African Americans serving in the armed forces, the army became "a great cauldron, mixing the New Negro culture, which had developed since the migration of the twenties and thirties, and the Old Negro culture, the remnants of traditional rural black culture in the South." The massive movement of black Southerners to centers of defense production in the North marked one of the largest internal migrations in American history.
Black civil rights activism accelerated under the banner of the Double V campaign, a movement first promoted by the Pittsburgh Courier. Double V advocates combined the fight against fascism abroad with the struggle for racial equality and full democracy at home. When the president failed to respond to black demands for equal inclusion in the war effort, labor leader A. Philip Randolph promised to lead 10,000 black Americans in a march on Washington to compel federal action. At the eleventh hour Roosevelt issued Executive Order 8802, which prohibited discrimination in defense industries and federal agencies and created the president's Fair Employment Practices Committee (FEPC) to implement the law. It was the first federal agency since Reconstruction devoted to dealing with racial discrimination.
The NAACP and the Southern Movement
During the war years, NAACP membership soared to nearly 400,000 nationally, and the rate of growth in the South surpassed that in all other regions. Having reported 18,000 members in the late 1930s, the NAACP claimed 156,000 members in the South by the war's end. Ella Baker, Southern field secretary for the NAACP, reported that the growth in membership brought a "new surge of identity" among black communities around the South. Through the organization of local branches and state conferences of the NAACP, Southern blacks created an infrastructure for sustained political struggle.
In the spring of 1944, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Smith v. Allwright that the all-white Democratic primary was unconstitutional. This ruling was the culmination of the NAACP's 20-year-long legal battle against the South's most effective legal means of barring blacks from political participation. "Once the Supreme Court opened the door in 1944," civil rights activist Palmer Weber recalled, "the NAACP charged into the whole registration and voting area very hard."
From 1944 to 1948 the NAACP, along with SNYC, the SCHW, and the CIO Political Action Committee (CIO-PAC), joined with other local and state groups to promote voter registration. When South Carolina Democrats continued to bar blacks from the party, black newspaperman John McCray and NAACP activist Osceola McKaine organized the South Carolina Progressive Democratic Party (PDP). The PDP sent a delegation to the 1944 Democratic National Convention in an unsuccessful effort to challenge old-guard Democrats for failing to open the state party to blacks. That fall the PDP ran its own slate of candidates. Black veterans, like Medgar Evers and Charles Evers in Mississippi, often took leading roles in voter registration efforts. In Birmingham black veterans marched in uniforms to the Jefferson County Court House to register to vote.
Henry Lee Moon, a journalist and a Southern field organizer for the CIO-PAC, reported: "Negro groups, sometimes in collaboration with labor and progressive groups, sometimes alone, are setting up schools to instruct new voters in the intricacies of registration, marking the ballot, and manipulating the voting machine." By the late 1940s the total number of registered black voters in the South approached 1 million; it had been estimated at 200,000 in 1940. The increases were most striking in South Carolina, where the number of black voters climbed from 3500 to 50,000, and in Georgia, where the number rose from 20,000 to 118,000.
Southern whites met growing black political participation with terror and fraud. There were countless individual acts of violence against blacks who voted, as well as public campaigns on the parts of candidates like Eugene Talmadge in Georgia and Theodore Bilbo in Mississippi, inviting whites to do what was necessary to keep blacks from the polls. In several cases black veterans were gunned down after voting. Publicly staged acts of violence against blacks increased during the 1946 primary season and included the execution-style murders of two black couples in Walton County, Georgia. There is evidence that Talmadge stole his gubernatorial win in 1946 and that the Justice Department had enough information to indict him. But the department chose not to pursue the matter.
Postwar America: The Emergence of Civil Rights as a National Issue
Wartime experience and the growing power of the Northern black vote elevated the importance of civil rights in national politics. At the war's end, decolonization movements in Africa and Asia and the beginnings of the cold war between the United States and the Soviet Union heightened the rhetoric of freedom, democracy, and self-determination. In 1947, W. E. B. Du Bois sought unsuccessfully to enlist the United Nations in an international investigation of racial discrimination in the United States.
President Harry S. Truman responded to the call for civil rights reform by commissioning a review of racial discrimination, which resulted in a report that called for sweeping federal action against Jim Crow. Truman was reluctant to act in the face of strong Southern opposition. But a close 1948 presidential race in which victory in key Northern states hinged on the black vote compelled him to endorse a strong civil rights plank at the Democratic National Convention. Southerners left the convention in protest and ran their own candidate for president in 1948 on the States Rights Party ticket. Shortly after the convention, Truman issued an executive order desegregating the armed forces.

The confident Democratic initiatives of the 1930s and 1940s, however, were overwhelmed by two postwar political factors: (1) the cold war and the Truman administration's domestic loyalty-security program, which limited civil liberties; and (2) the acceleration of white Southern repression of any challenge to the Jim Crow system. Groups like SNYC and the SCHW became targets of government investigations. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) sought out suspected communists and fellow travelers, while a revived Ku Klux Klan terrorized blacks attempting to vote in the South and Southern civic leaders presided over fraudulent elections. Indeed, Charles Houston wondered why the loudly proclaimed crusade to "lead the world to democracy" did not extend to the Southern United States. Why were free and fair elections in Eastern Europe of greater import to the U.S. government than open elections in Alabama and Mississippi?

[phoenix]

Part IV

The Civil Rights Struggle in the 1950s
During the 1950s the struggle against Jim Crow in the South remained distant from national issues and concerns. After 1948 the Democratic Party placated its rebellious Southern wing while its civil rights agenda floundered. Meanwhile, whites responded to the steady migration of Southern blacks to Northern cities by extending patterns of racial segregation and black exclusion in housing, employment, and education.
The foundation of the Civil Rights Movement remained anchored in the cumulative gains of the NAACP legal campaign and its extensive network of branches. Southern NAACP leaders, however, faced an emboldened defense of the racial status quo. In 1951 the Christmas Day assassination of Harry T. Moore, a leading NAACP organizer in Florida, and his wife inaugurated a decade of white terrorism and state-sponsored repression that heightened in the aftermath of the Brown decision.
Brown v. Board of Education
On May 17, 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously ruled in Brown v. Board of Education that the doctrine of separate but equal as applied to public education was unconstitutional. Brown marked the culmination of the NAACP's long legal battle; the Court had effectively reversed its 1896 decision in Plessy v. Ferguson, the cornerstone of the segregation system. By implication, state-mandated racial segregation in all areas of public life violated the Constitution.
However, the Court issued a separate ruling one year later concerning the enforcement of this momentous decision. Sympathetic to warnings of Southern white defiance, the Court allowed for a policy of gradual implementation that would, the opinion explained, be responsive to local conditions and problems. While calling for compliance "with all deliberate speed," the Court reflected the ambivalence of the justices, executive and congressional leadership, and the vast majority of Americans about dismantling racial segregation in the South. For most white Southerners, Brown II was a license to resist. During the next ten years, less than 1 percent of black children in the South attended "white" schools.

Brown was a major turning point in the struggle for civil rights, and it marked the beginning of the most celebrated chapter of the Civil Rights Movement. The decade that followed saw a heightening interplay between Southern blacks striving to realize the promise of Brown in the face of "massive resistance" by Southern whites and the equivocal response of the federal government, unfolding on an increasingly national and international stage.
Emmett Till, Montgomery, and the Emergence of Martin Luther King Jr.
In August 1955, just three months after the court ruled in Brown II, 14-year-old Emmett Till was murdered in Money, Mississippi, for allegedly whistling at a white woman. Mamie Bradley, Till's mother, brought her son's body home to Chicago and insisted on an open casket so that all could see "what they did to my boy." Jet magazine's photograph of Till's badly mutilated body offered gruesome evidence of the terror that reigned in Mississippi, and it informed the consciousness of a new generation of young black people. The widely publicized trial and acquittal of Till's murderers confirmed what most already knew about the Southern system of racial injustice.
That December, Rosa Parks, a local NAACP leader in Montgomery, Alabama, refused to surrender her seat on a city bus to a white man. This action, and the mobilizing work of the Women's Political Council, sparked a boycott of Montgomery buses that lasted for 381 days. Local black leaders elected Martin Luther King Jr., the new 26-year-old minister of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, as head of the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA), the organization that led the boycott and sued to end segregation on the buses. Hundreds of African Americans, mostly women, walked several miles to and from work each day; as one woman commented, "My feet is tired, but my soul is rested." This dignified protest contrasted with the city's efforts to intimidate the MIA leadership through indictments, injunction, and the bombing of King's house, and it attracted the attention of the national and international media.
By the time the Supreme Court struck down segregation on the buses in December 1956, King had become a seasoned leader and eloquent spokesman of the emerging nonviolent movement. Early in 1957, King joined with other activist ministers and civil rights leaders like Bayard Rustin and Ella Baker to establish the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC); King was elected its president, and Baker became the first executive director. The SCLC served as an umbrella organization, linking church-based affiliates throughout the South in the nonviolent struggle for racial justice and to "redeem the soul of America."
The NAACP, Little Rock, and School Desegregation
The fight for school integration had few supporters outside the black community. The NAACP aided parents who petitioned school boards to admit their children to the all-white schools, in compliance with the Brown decision, but the organization became the target of an extensive effort across the South to shut it down. In 1956 Alabama passed a state law effectively barring the NAACP from operating in that state; South Carolina barred NAACP members from state employment. Five other states enacted laws requiring the NAACP to register and to provide lists of members and contributors. While such state action was often unconstitutional, the burden was on local NAACP branches to spend scarce resources in fighting to overturn these laws. In the meantime, the White Citizens Council (WCC), founded in Sunflower County, Mississippi, in 1956, organized local businessmen and civic leaders throughout the South. WCC chapters used economic reprisals and manipulation of the law in an effort to intimidate and undermine civil rights activists and supporters.
Southern obstructionists met their first major setback in Little Rock, Arkansas. In 1957 a group of local parents, working with NAACP leader Daisy Bates, succeeded in winning a court order mandating the admission of black students to Central High School. Governor Orval Faubus employed the National Guard to block the admission of the nine men and women selected to attend Central High. The governor's bold defiance of the federal courts compelled President Eisenhower, who was no supporter of school integration, to send in army troops and federalize the Arkansas National Guard in order to ensure peaceful compliance with the court order. After the school year ended, the governor closed the public schools to avoid further integration.
From 1957 to 1959 public schools in Virginia, Georgia, Alabama, closed rather than obey desegregation orders. In New Orleans, when public schools admitted four young black girls to the first grade, whites in the city rioted.

[phoenix]

Part V-

The Right to Vote The Civil Rights Act of 1957 and Macon County, Alabama

Read the rest at:

http://www.africana.com/research/encarta/civil.asp

[PrinceMannyX]

[demmeri]

this is what i've been trying to tell you boogies, man.

the republicans have had our backs this whole dayum time...

it was a republican president that set your black ass free, and it was a republican congress that gave you your civil rights....

black folk didn't start voting democrat until jesse jackson begun getting paid millions to tell black that the republicans where a bunch of racist for not giving out free handouts...

JESSE IS GETTING PAID MILLIONS TO DO WHAT HE DOES! :idea: