The Martin Duberman Reader (23 page)

At the beginning of 1957, nonviolent radical activists like Ella Baker and Bayard Rustin helped to organize the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) led by activist ministers, including Martin Luther King Jr. Like most men at the time, the ministers held sexist views—women were regarded as subordinate helpmates; SCLC's mission was racial, not gender, equality—and neither Ella Baker nor Rosa Parks was invited to join the patriarchal inner circle (though in 1958 SCLC did hire Baker as a full-time staff member in Atlanta). Nor were relations particularly cordial between SCLC and the NAACP, which tended to view the upstart new organization as unnecessarily duplicating its own civil rights work.

During the year that she worked for SCLC, Baker's discontent grew. Somewhat blind to King's relative modesty in the face of so much adoration, she deplored SCLC's growing reliance on his celebrity and its concomitant emphasis on a top-down organizational strategy that had the double effect of discouraging participation among poor, grassroots blacks while encouraging the all-too-familiar kind of demeaning deference that already marked their relationship with whites.

Baker decided to leave SCLC and turned her attention to grassroots activity; within the year, she and Howard would meet. In the interim Howard suggested to the Social Science Club early in 1959 that the group might find it interesting (in his words) “to undertake some real project involving social change.” One of the students suggested trying to do something about the segregation of Atlanta's
public library system. The idea was enthusiastically taken up and the target chosen was Carnegie, the main library in Atlanta.

Along with Howard, the students enlisted the help of Whitney Young, then dean of the School of Social Work at Atlanta University (in 1961 he became head of the National Urban League), and Dr. Irene Dobbs Jackson, professor of French at Spelman and the sister of Mattiwilda Dobbs, then a well-known coloratura soprano and the first black singer to be given a long-term contract at the Metropolitan Opera. (Irene Jackson's son, Maynard Jackson, would in 1974 become the first African American mayor of Atlanta.)

The group carefully discussed a strategy plan. That its tactics would be nonviolent went without saying. Beyond that, it was decided to rely on polite but persistent and repetitive requests from Carnegie for books with obviously relevant content: John Stuart Mill's
On Liberty,
Tom Paine's
Common Sense,
or John Locke's
An Essay Concerning Human Understanding.
Each request got the same response: “We'll send a copy of that book to your Negro branch.” (Atlanta had three libraries for blacks, all of them inadequate.) To further heighten the library's uneasiness, hints were made that a lawsuit might well follow if black students continued to be denied access to use of the books at Carnegie itself, with Professor Irene Jackson as one of the plaintiffs.

Howard was sitting in Whitney Young's office talking about possible next moves when a phone call informed Young that the Library Board had just made the decision to end segregation throughout the Atlanta library system. That swift and substantial victory preceded by nearly two years the wave of sit-ins in 1960–61 for which Greensboro, North Carolina, became the symbol. It also confirmed Howard's developing view—which would ripen a few years later into his book
The Southern Mystique
—that the typical white Southerner cared about segregation, but cared about other matters
more,
including economic profit, peer approval, and political power.

Greensboro, in fact, wasn't the first instance of black resistance. There'd been several dozen flash points during the 1950s, including
the frightening struggle in 1957 to integrate Central High in Little Rock. But the underground fires of resentment and anger weren't quite yet stoked to the level of erupting in a mass movement. The Greensboro sit-in did make a significant contribution to that end. On February 1, 1960, four black freshmen from North Carolina Agricultural and Technical College sat down at a Woolworth's lunch counter in Greensboro, asked for service, were refused, and then stayed put at the counter until the store closed at 5:30. The following day, they returned—along with twenty-three other students—and in the next few days the protest quickly expanded, with at least eight other sit-down strikes that week in North Carolina alone.

The time now
was
ripe. The earlier generation had relied on more traditional means—like court cases—for moving desegregation forward, means that now seemed too slow for the new generation of black college students. Far more than their elders, moreover, they were insistent on basing decision making in the movement on ground-level participation. In their intensity, the sit-in generation could sometimes forget or minimize the major contributions that the older black organizations had made—necessary precursors, perhaps, to the militant turn the movement was now taking. The NAACP had focused on litigation, the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) on reducing Northern racism, and SCLC on operating through the most powerful of black institutions, the church. Several leaders of the older organizations—Roy Wilkins in particular—had their doubts about the confrontational style, the “aggressiveness,” of the sit-ins, and feared they'd prove counterproductive.

But if some members of SCLC and the NAACP were caught by surprise and reacted with disapproval, others, including Martin Luther King Jr., welcomed the new energy that now infused the black struggle. The (partly) spontaneous and variable nature of the sit-ins did take many by surprise—and as well, many of the historians who later wrote about them. Historians tend to be logical-minded types not comfortable with the unexpected and spontaneous, and thus not likely to factor it into their rational and confident “explanations” of why a given event takes place—thus missing the opportunity to
underscore the messy triggers of change, the mysterious and unpremeditated elements in human behavior.

The Greensboro sit-in was widely covered in the national media and a veritable firestorm of sit-ins followed. Within days, a group of AUC students went to talk with Benjamin Mays, the most liberal of the AUC college presidents. Mays gave them his blessing, but soon after, he got a phone call from Roy Wilkins, the conservative head of the NAACP, who'd somehow gotten wind of the students' plans. He told Mays, who relayed the message to the students, that they should stick to their studies and that the NAACP would continue the desegregation battle through the courts.

Student leaders from all six colleges of the AUC consortium decided to ignore Wilkins and to publish “An Appeal for Human Rights” in three Atlanta newspapers, including the
Atlanta Constitution.
Roslyn Pope, president of the Spelman student government and close to Howard and Roz (Pope was one of many students who used the Zinns' home as a combination sanctuary and planning center) wrote most of the first draft.

The reworked “Appeal for Human Rights” appeared on March 9 and was then reprinted in
The Nation
on April 2. Howard thought the students had produced a “remarkable” document. It itemized black grievances in eloquent detail and asserted the determination “to use every legal and nonviolent means at our disposal” to end the widespread suffering under segregation. “The students who instigate and participate in these sit-down protests,” the appeal read, “are dissatisfied not only with existing conditions, but with the snail-like speed at which they are being ameliorated.”

Ernest Vandiver, governor of Georgia, immediately branded the appeal “anti-American,” claimed it could not have been written by students (talk about a backhanded compliment), and predicted that this “left-wing statement is calculated to breed dissatisfaction, discontent, discord, and evil”—apparently a reference to a line in the appeal stating, “We do not intend to wait placidly for those rights which are already legally and morally ours to be meted out to us one at a time.”

Six days after Vandiver's outburst, several hundred students from AUC staged sit-in demonstrations at ten different eating places in the city—including restaurants in the state capitol and City Hall. Howard's role that day was to call the city's newspapers at exactly 11:00
A.M.
and read to them the list of restaurants where the students planned to sit-in. Seventy-seven of the students were promptly arrested—fourteen from Spelman, nearly all of them from the Deep South. One of the fourteen, Marian Wright, was photographed sitting calmly in a cell reading C.S. Lewis's
The Screwtape Letters
—a photo widely reproduced. By April, the sit-ins had spread throughout the upper South, and there were even a handful in the Deep South (though none of those, unlike in the border areas, were successful). That same month students from various colleges gathered in Raleigh, North Carolina, to form the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).

By midsummer of 1961, an estimated fifty thousand students (some of them white, like Jane Stembridge, Bill Hansen, and Bob Zellner, who became well known in the movement) had participated in sit-ins—four thousand of whom spent time in jail—and 110 cities had desegregated their public facilities. Yet the Deep South still held firm. The arrested Spelman students were never brought to trial, but a remarkable change had come to pass. Even the school's cautious president, Alfred Manley, for a time shifted ground. At commencement that year, he spontaneously congratulated the senior class “for breaking the ‘docile generation' label” with their demonstrations. That same year the first white students arrived at Spelman as part of an exchange program, and several liberal whites joined the faculty. Simultaneously, the amount of contact with white students from other Atlanta colleges (like Emory) escalated.

This shift in climate meant that a significant number of Spelman students would become or remain active in the series of protests that soon followed. The next target chosen was Rich's department store, Atlanta's largest. Again, Howard and his wife Roz played significant roles. Entering Rich's, they bought coffee and sandwiches at the counter and then sat down at one of the tables. By prearrangement,
two black students then joined them. Another group of four followed (including, again, Pat and Henry West) using the same strategy. Instead of calling the police, Rich's simply turned off the lights and shut down the lunch counter. A few more black students also showed up and in the semidarkness they talked contentedly among themselves until closing hour. By fall 1961, Rich's ended its policy of segregation and nearly two hundred other Atlanta restaurants followed suit.

By 1961, Atlanta and Nashville had between them become a kind of epicenter for SNCC, with its Atlanta office staffed by two fulltime people. By then, Ella Baker and Howard had been invited to serve as senior advisors to SNCC—a measure of the high regard the radical generation of young black students had for them. The spring and summer of 1961 also saw the phenomenon of Freedom Rides. Designed to put an end to segregated interstate travel, they were no sooner inaugurated than they were met with savage beatings, firebombs, arrests, and jailings. In Anniston, Alabama, the melee was so bloody that several Freedom Riders had to be hospitalized.

The federal government tut-tutted over the violence, but continued to do nothing to stop it, though Howard and others strenuously pointed out the several sections in the Constitution that allowed for, even mandated, intervention by President Kennedy and Attorney General Robert Kennedy. But if they had the justification for acting forcefully, the Kennedys lacked the will. When the Freedom Riders were beaten with iron pipes in Birmingham and one of their buses set afire, the passengers barely managing to escape with their lives, Robert Kennedy did nothing—though the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution gave him the right, even the obligation, to overrule the states and to use the power of the federal government to protect citizens against racial discrimination.

But in 1961, the Justice Department did succeed in sending a shock wave across the country by initiating a large-scale prosecution—not against racist white thugs who'd been attacking nonviolent protestors but against eight black leaders of the so-called Albany Movement (plus one white sympathizer).

While the administration, reliant on Southern white votes, continued to dither, the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC) ruled (and here the Kennedys
did
exert some pressure) that interstate bus and train travel must henceforth be completely desegregated. Still, an abstract pronouncement from on high hardly guaranteed local compliance—and especially not in the Deep South. That became all too clear when Charles Sherrod and Cordell Reagon, both veterans of the Freedom Rides, decided—with unimaginable courage—to test the ICC ruling in Albany, Georgia. They set up workshops to train volunteers in nonviolent action and picked up a dozen or so recruits for the tryout run. The plan was to sit at the lunch counter in the Albany bus terminal and try to get served.

But FBI agents had in advance alerted Albany's notoriously racist sheriff, Laurie Pritchett, and he planned a painful reception for the protestors. Cleverly circumventing the ICC ruling, he arrested the students for “failing to obey the orders of an officer,” and had them jailed. This didn't in itself overly alarm those arrested since “fill the jails” had become one of SNCC's key tactics, yet SNCC did notify the Department of Justice about the jailings. Again, nothing happened. SNCC next tried to target the railroads. Once again Pritchett had them arrested, shifting the rationale to “disorderly conduct.”

Within Albany's black community, word of SNCC's ongoing defiance spread quickly. Grassroots black support for the students became so decisive that much of the community's middle-class leadership fell into line—which hadn't usually been the case elsewhere. Three weeks later, Martin Luther King Jr. arrived in Albany to join the protest. Mass meetings and marches followed, along with many arrests (the total at one point reached 737). This time the ever-inventive Pritchett cited the offense of “parading without a permit,” and—somehow—he also got the city attorney to obtain a
federal
court order banning further demonstrations.