The Jim Crow Laws and Racism in United States History (8 page)

In January 1956, city commissioners announced that the city council had reached a settlement with a group of black ministers. King contacted the ministers who had met the whites. They denied any settlement. When word of this phony agreement reached the black community, blacks became more suspicious of whites than ever.

On January 26, Martin Luther King, Jr., was arrested for driving thirty miles per hour in a twenty-five-mile-per-hour zone. He was taken to the police station and fingerprinted, then released. A few days later, a white extremist bombed the minister’s house. Within minutes, more than five hundred people gathered at King’s home. When police ordered them to leave, they would not do so. They left only when asked by King.

The bombing made blacks more determined than ever. On January 31, attorney Fred Gray filed a lawsuit to outlaw segregation on the Montgomery bus system. Montgomery’s white residents also went to the courts. On February 21, a special grand jury indicted 115 of the boycott’s leaders, including Nixon and Rosa Parks. King, however, was the real target. He was the only one who went to trial. King was found guilty. He faced a five-hundred-dollar fine or 386 days of hard labor.

This was terrible publicity for Montgomery’s white community. Already the local government officials, police department, and newspapers were being ridiculed by the national media. Now protest leader King was viewed as a martyr, and the white establishment as a group of bullies.

Meanwhile, federal courts sided with the boycotters. On June 4, a three-judge panel ruled Montgomery’s bus segregation unconstitutional. The city appealed. But in November, the Supreme Court upheld the panel’s ruling. The Court’s order was officially served in Montgomery on December 20, 1956.

The year-long animosity seemed to melt immediately. The following morning at 5:45 A.M., King, Nixon, Gray, Abernathy, and Parks waited at a bus stop outside King’s home. The driver smiled and said, “I believe you are Reverend King, aren’t you?”

“Yes, I am,” King answered.

“We are glad to have you this morning,” the driver told him.
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Sit-ins

The F. W. Woolworth store in Greensboro, North Carolina, irritated Ralph Johns. He hated the fact that black patrons were not served at the store’s lunch counter. Woolworth’s was not unique. Lunch counters were a part of many department stores. In almost all cases in the South, blacks could shop in the stores but could not eat there.

Johns, a clothing salesman and former movie actor, felt a protest was necessary. As a white man, he was not the appropriate person to lead such an action. Johns sought blacks whose desire for action outweighed their fear of consequences. Greensboro’s black college, North Carolina A & T, had several such students. In fact, the school had a reputation for activism.

Johns approached freshman Joseph McNeil just before Thanksgiving in 1959. “I says, ‘Joe, you got any guts?’ . . .” he recalled.
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Johns explained his plan for black students to sit at the Woolworth’s lunch counter until they were served. McNeil said he would think about it.

McNeil took no action until after Christmas vacation. When he returned to school, an arrogant waitress brushed crumbs on him and refused him service. McNeil returned to Johns and plotted action.

In early February 1960, four black students entered Woolworth’s and made small purchases. When one student requested something to eat at the lunch counter, the waitress told him that the store did not serve blacks. He pulled out a receipt and said, “You just finished serving me at a counter two feet from here.”
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The waitress still refused to serve him. The store’s manager did nothing. All four students remained until closing time.

The next day, they brought company. When the students were refused service, they remained at the counter and read books. Day after day, the number of protesters at these “sit-ins” grew. The idea spread to other stores in Greensboro and across the South. Some stores retaliated by closing their lunch counters.

City officials agreed to negotiate the dispute. Students agreed to call off the sit-ins during negotiations. But the city kept delaying. By the first of April, many students felt they were the victims of an April Fool’s prank. They returned to the lunch counters.

By the middle of summer, Woolworth’s yielded. The store allowed blacks to be served at its lunch counters. Other stores grudgingly made the same decision. The success of the sit-ins led to read-ins at libraries, wade-ins at beaches, and kneel-ins at all-white churches.

Johns returned to the background, but not before receiving a notable visitor. The Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., came to him and said, “Mr. Johns, I want you to know that someday our people will know what you have done, and they will thank you for it.”
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Freedom Riders

Congress had the authority to pass laws to protect the rights of American citizens. But was anyone paying attention to those laws? In early 1961, a courageous group of activists decided to find out.

James Farmer, the director of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), said, “We knew we had to get the support of the country behind us to end segregation. We had to have some kind of dramatic project to attract the attention of the press, and especially television.”
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That project turned out to be an interracial bus trip known as the Freedom Ride.

The Freedom Riders set out in two buses from Washington, D.C., on May 4, 1961. They planned to stop in several Southern cities before arriving in New Orleans, Louisiana. At each stop, they would compare washroom and food facilities available for blacks and whites. The riders documented many racial inequalities along their way.

Neither bus would make it to New Orleans. Federal authorities did little to help the riders. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) had informants who warned of violence in Alabama. Yet the FBI did nothing to block such violence.

A mob of about two hundred people awaited the riders when they stopped at the northeastern Alabama town of Anniston. Members of the mob started beating on one bus and smashing in the windows. Demonstrating a point for civil rights would have to wait for another time. The bus and its passengers hurried out of town without stopping.

Five miles outside of town, the Freedom Riders’ bus stopped. Its tires had been slashed by angry whites. The mob followed the bus to its stopping point. At first, riders locked themselves inside the bus. Then someone threw a firebomb inside.

Ironically, the bomb saved the Freedom Riders. It caused an explosion of the bus’s gas tank, which scattered many of the attackers. Even so, others moved forward to attack the Freedom Riders. E. L. Cowling, an undercover official of the Alabama State Police, had been riding on the bus. At the last moment, he pulled out a gun and pointed it at the members of the white mob. He was able to hold them off until an ambulance could bring the riders to safety. The riders regrouped in Birmingham, Alabama, where they decided to abandon their mission.

The failure of one mission, however, did not mean the end of all missions. Another group of Freedom Riders came from Nashville, Tennessee, to Birmingham. It met with violence in Montgomery. Despite the setbacks, a sense of victory prevailed. One of the riders, John Lewis, said “If not us, who? If not now, then when? . . . Will someone else’s children have to risk their lives instead of us risking ours?”
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Chapter 9

THE RIGHT TO SERVE, THE RIGHT TO VOTE

Like whites, African Americans paid taxes. Yet those taxes did not give them equal political representation. African Americans were deprived of two important parts of the American experience—the right to equality in the military and the right to vote.

African Americans in the Military

Few sights angered a white Southerner more than a black man in a military uniform. First, the uniform meant honor—a quality whites hated to see in blacks. Second, soldiers carried weapons, and whites dreaded the thought of an armed black person.

After the Civil War, new military units formed from state militias. Black Southerners, barred from the militias, were kept out of the military. From the time of the Civil War, Congress had allowed black soldiers, but only in all-black regiments. Wherever they fought, black soldiers distinguished themselves. Colonel Theodore Roosevelt led a famous charge up San Juan Hill in Cuba during the Spanish-American War. Two black cavalry troops took part in the charge. By the end of the war, more than a hundred black soldiers were named officers.

During World War I, the all-black 369th Infantry Division performed with amazing valor. Its troops never lost ground, and never had a man captured. Another all-black unit, the 371st Infantry, also saw action in France. The grateful French government gave three officers the Legion of Honor and awarded the
Croix de Guerre
to thirty-four officers and eighty-nine enlisted men.

Yet bravery in combat did not bring blacks respect at home. Black soldiers, generally supervised by white officers, remained second-class citizens. Southern military bases, where most black troops did their training, rigidly enforced Jim Crow laws.

On the eve of World War II, the American military still kept races apart. A policy statement from Assistant Secretary of War Robert P. Patterson declared, “The policy of the War Department is not to intermingle colored and white enlisted personnel in the same regimental organizations. This policy has proved satisfactory over a long period of years.”
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Although still segregated, black troops fought valiantly during World War II. The 99th Squadron, which trained at Tuskegee Institute, won impressive victories in Italy. This group, known as the Tuskegee Airmen, was one of the most celebrated American units in the war.

President Harry Truman appreciated the heroism of African Americans. He submitted a proposal to Congress in early 1948, calling for an end to discrimination and segregation in the armed forces. Southern Congress members opposed the bill. On July 26, Truman issued Executive Order 9981. It called for equality of treatment in the military. Black soldiers and sailors were now given equal rights by the president, their Commander in Chief. Many, however, would wait half a generation before they could vote for that commander.

The Right to Vote

Newly freed slaves had won the right to vote in 1870, thanks to the Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution. That right proved short-lived. At first, terrorism and violence kept blacks from the polls. Later, state laws produced the same results.

Mississippi changed its constitution in 1890. The new document required voters to read or provide “a reasonable interpretation” of parts of the state constitution.
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What was a “reasonable interpretation”? In reality, if a white man gave an interpretation, it was reasonable. If a black man said the same thing, it was most likely not.

Other states followed Mississippi’s example. Soon, all Southern state constitutions had poll taxes or literacy test clauses. Some influential Southern blacks were given a pass to register and vote.

“. . . More Negroes in Jail”

As late as 1960, many blacks in the South appeared as unlikely as their grandfathers to gain suffrage (the right to vote). But conditions were different later in the decade. Blacks had experienced struggles, and they had seen victories. Thanks to the
Brown
v.
Board of Education
decision, their children could go to school with white children. Thanks to the boycott in Montgomery, blacks could ride buses alongside whites. If blacks could be alongside whites at school or on a bus, why not at the ballot box?

White resistance was the reason why not. Martin Luther King, Jr., after a 1963 arrest for civil disobedience, gave a frightening commentary. “This is Selma, Alabama,” he wrote. “There are more Negroes in jail with me than there are on the voting rolls.”
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Selma

By the mid-1960s, Alabama had a reputation as one of the most repressive states toward blacks. Even by Alabama standards, the town of Selma was severe. Judge James Hare, the town’s political leader, took the civil rights movement as a personal insult. In 1964, he issued an order to stop civil rights demonstrations in the town.

Hare’s political ally, Sheriff Jim Clark, enforced Hare’s orders. Because of the television news coverage, many Americans stereotyped Southern sheriffs as bullying, bigoted brutes. Clark fit that image perfectly. When fifty would-be black voters came to register in late 1964, Clark and his deputies met them with electric cattle prods. Despite threats, black Selma residents and some white supporters continued to push for civil rights.

In February, demonstrators marched to the courthouse in nearby Marion. One of the marchers was Selma resident Jamie Lee Jackson. As the marchers neared the courthouse, troopers blocked their path. One chased Jackson into a nearby cafe. Jackson was shot while trying to protect his mother from troopers. He died a few days later.

Selma’s voting rights movement now had a martyr. The Reverend James Bevel suggested more dramatic action. “I’ve got something to say to the governor about Jamie Lee Jackson,” Bevel said. “I thought I would walk to Montgomery and tell the governor in person. Mr. Cage [Jackson’s grandfather] has said he’s willing to walk with me.”
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Bevel, Cage, and more than six hundred others prepared for a march from Selma to Montgomery on March 7, 1965.