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Retracing the footsteps of the civil rights movement
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FIGHTING FOR A BETTER TOMORROW
Many initiatives of the civil rights movement were advanced by college age students - young, passionate, fearless and liberal. Sick and tired of racial discrimination, these student activists dared to defy the long-standing system, especially in fighting for their own opportunities to education. Set against the scene of newly desegregated schools, it was a struggle to even attempt to register for classes.
The Places
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It was at this theatre that Stokely Carmichael gave his Black Power speech. The principle leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), he later became an activist for Black Power after SNCC and himself became frustrated with Martin Luther King Jr.’s non-violent approach. Instead, he opted for a direct, confrontational approach that encouraged self-determinism.
The speech popularised the phrase "black power", spurred the movement. In it, he criticised the Civil Rights bill for supporting white supremacy, and noted that blacks would not stop in their fight for liberation. To quote his speech: "I am black, therefore I am" - Carmichael wanted blacks to be proud in their own skin, to be strong to demand for their rights, and to take power in their own hands.
In addition, since U.C. Berkeley is an institution home to many intellectuals and scholars, Carmichael’s audience would differ from King’s typical audience. Many of them (being college students) were probably already in favour of civil rights, meaning that Carmichael could make use of critical thinking to rally them together. Criticising white society, white supremacy and America itself served to strengthen his cause.
“Those of us who advocate Black power are quite clear in our own minds that a "non-violent" approach to civil rights is an approach black people cannot afford and a luxury white people do not deserve.”
- Stokely Carmichael and Charles V. Hamilton. Black Power: The Politics of Liberation in America.
After the rulings of Brown v. Board of Education, black students were being registered by The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in previously all-white schools as part of integration efforts.
Despite that, on one September morning in 1957, 9 black students (known as the Little Rock Nine) were denied entry to Little Rock Central High School by then Governor of Arkansas, Orval Farbus. In an act of defiance against the Supreme Court, Farbus deployed the Arkansas National Guard on their first day to block them from entering. The situation made international and national headlines.
“I’m nobody. I’ve never been hated. I’ve been loved all my life. I’m beautiful. I’m smart. I just can’t believe this. So I kind of describe it as having my heart broken. [...] So the heartbreak was: ‘I’m supposed to be living in a democracy. What? These people hate me. They don’t know me. They want to kill me.’”
Pictured: US Army trucks loaded with steel-helmeted US Marshals roll across the University of Mississippi campus, with Ole Miss fraternity houses in the background
A riot broke out here in protest against desegregation, in response to James Meredith’s enrollment into the University of Mississippi.
He was denied admission twice, despite having served in the Air Force for 9 years and achieving good grades in Jackson State University. A lawsuit was filed, and the Supreme Court eventually ruled that Meredith had every right to attend University of Mississippi.
This triggered a “constitutional crisis”. To subdue the mob that gathered on campus, the Kennedy administration ordered federal troops, the Mississippi National Guard and even US Border Patrol to intervene. In the subsequent violent clashes, the white mob burned cars, pelted the troops with rocks, bricks and small arms fire, and damaged university property. The chaos culminated in the deaths of two men by gunshot. The day after the riots, Meredith became the first African-American to be admitted into the university.
Meredith's persistence marked a new chapter in the civil rights movement and helped open doors to higher education.
He would then go on to lead a one-man March Against Fear, a 220 mile long solo hike from Tennessee and Mississippi to encourage voter registration after the passing of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Most recently, the Harvard Graduate School of Education gave him its Lifetime Achievement Award in 2013.
“Segregation now,
segregation tomorrow,
segregation forever"
- George Wallace, 1963 inaugural address
Pictured: Wallace standing in the doorway, being confronted by Deputy U.S. Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach at the University of Alabama.
By June 11 1963, the Brown v. Board of Education had already been won by anti-segregationalist.
However, Alabama Governor George Wallace sought to challenge this ruling by standing in the doorway of the University of Alabama’s Foster Auditorium in a bid to block the entry of two blacks students, Vivian Malone and James Hood, from enrolling.
In response, President Kennedy called on the Alabama National Guards with an Executive Order to command Wallace to step aside.
This symbolic attempt became known as the Stand in the Schoolhouse Door, and brought Wallace into the national spotlight.
Pictured: Vivian Malone arriving at Foster Auditorium to register for classes.
Helmed by Ella Baker, Shaw University was where the founding conference of SNCC was held. While Baker was serving as Executive Secretary for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), she saw potential in students involved in the Greensboro sit-ins and invited them to meet at the leadership conference. Bolstered by her encouragements, the students decided to form their own organisation, SNCC.
Learn From the Past,
Organize for the Future,
Make Democracy Work
- SNCC
Howard university
WASHINGTON, D.C.
In 1954, the fight for education saw the landmark case of Brown v. Board of Education, where the Supreme Court established unanimously that state laws denoting racial segregation of children in separate public schools were unconstitutional. This overturned the 1896 rulings of Plessy v. Ferguson which allowed for state-sponsored segregation ("separate but equal" ruling), making it one of the cornerstones of the civil rights movement.
Howard University is significant because its School of Law was where the legal case and strategies of the lawyers who led the fight to overturn segregation in schools were developed.
The school presented a place for mostly African American lawyers to be trained, many of whom protested the legal and legislative systems that oppressed blacks in nearly all aspects of the country - politically, economically and socially.
Many of the participating lawyers (such as future first black Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall and NAACP Litigation Director Charles Hamilton Houston) were either Howard Law professors or students.
As such, the case of Brown v. Board of Education paved the way for integration and fueled much of the civil rights movement in the years that followed.