The Civil Rights Movement: Beginnings

1. The Civil Rights Movement …beginnings

2. The Civil Rights Movement …beginnings

3. “I am an “invisible man. “No, I am not a spook like those who “ haunted Edgar Allan Poe; nor am I “ one of your Hollywood ectoplasms.

4. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, and liquids, and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me…. When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination — indeed, everything and anything except me.

5. Nor is my invisibility exactly a matter of biochemical accident to my epidermis. That invisibility to which I refer occurs because of a peculiar disposition of the eyes of those with whom I come into contact. A matter of construction of their inner eyes, those eyes with which they look through their physical eyes upon reality.

6. I am not complaining, nor am I protesting either. It is sometimes advantageous to be unseen, although it is most often rather wearing on the nerves. Then, too, you’re constantly being bumped against by those of poor vision. Or again, you often doubt if you really exist.

7. You wonder whether you aren’t simply a phantom in other people’s minds. Say, a figure in a nightmare which the sleeper tries with all his strength to destroy.

8. It’s when you feel like this that, out of resentment, you begin to bump people back.”

9. It’s when you feel like this that, out of resentment, you begin to bump people back.”

10. 2 Questions

11. Ultimate Causes?

12. Proximate Causes?

13. CRM ≠ MLK

14. Gallup Poll (AIPO) [February, 1965] “How would you rate the job that... Martin Luther King... has done in the fight for Negro rights?” 94% Positive 3% Negative 3% Not sure

15. Gallup Poll (AIPO) [August, 1963] “What are your feelings about [the] proposed mass civil rights rally to be held in Washington D.C. on August 28, 1963?” 23% Favorable 60% Unfavorable 17% No opinion

16. <1>

17. Ultimate: Preconditions for Racial Change

18. Ultimate: Preconditions for Racial Change 1. Ideological shifts 2. Nazi ideology & the Double “V” 3. Cold War 4. Migration & Urban Power 5. Economic Growth & Education

19. Ultimate: Preconditions for Racial Change 6. Protest Organizations 7. U.S. Military 8. Emmett Till 9. The Brown decision (SCOTUS)

20. Ideological shifts

21. Liberal Environmentalism

22. Nazi ideology

23. Cold War Competition

24. Migration

25. > North, > cities

26. 1910: 89% (80% rural) S

27. 1970s >80% (urban)

28. Why?

29. 50% 1960

30. Urban power base

31. Af-Am Church

32. Af-Am Church

33. Economic Growth

34. United Negro College Fund

35. Af-Am Colleges

36. Af-Am High Schools

41. 15,000 1930

42. 75,000 1950

43. Protest Organizations

44. National Association for the Advancement of Colored Peoples

45. Thurgood Marshall

46. 1948

47. Sgt. Isaac Woodard, 1946

48. Judge J. Waties Waring

49. Pres. Harry S Truman

50. “Segregation is per se inequality”

51. The Murder of Emmett Till

52. Supreme Court Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas (1954)

53. majority Northerners

54. 20%

55. “[F]rom this Cradle of the Confederacy, this very Heart of the Great Anglo- Saxon Southland…we sound the drum for freedom as have our generations of forebears before us done, time and time again through history…

56. “Let us…send our answer to the tyranny that clanks its chains upon the South. In the name of the greatest people that have ever trod this earth, I draw the line in the dust…and I say…segregation today…segregation tomorrow… segregation forever.”

57. “They [white southerners] are not bad people. All they are concerned about is…that their sweet little girls are not required to sit in school alongside some big overgrown Negroes.”

58. </1>

59. <2>

60. Proximate: Anti- Segregation Tactics

61. Proximate: Anti- Segregation Tactics 1. Bus Boycott(s) 2. Freedom Rides 3. Sit-ins 4. Etc.

62. “I know the one thing we did right Was the day we started to fight. Keep your eyes on the prize, Hold on, hold on.”

63. Montgomery Bus Boycott

64. Rosa Parks

65. Women’s Political Council

66. Jo Ann Robinson

67. SCLC Southern Christian Leadership Council

68. 381 days

69. “unConstitutional” Alabama, 1956

70. CORE Congress of Racial Equality

71. “Freedom Rides”

72. Gallup Poll (AIPO) [May, 1961] “Do you approve or disapprove of what the ‘Freedom Riders’ are doing?” 22% Approve 61% Disapprove 18% No opinion

73. SNCC: Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee

74. Gallup Poll (AIPO) [May, 1961] “Do you think ‘sit-ins’ at lunch counters, ‘freedom buses’, and other demonstrations by Negroes will hurt or help the Negro’s chances of being integrated in the South?” 57% Hurt 28% Help 16% No opinion

75. </2>

76. <3>

77. RESULTS: Legislative Triumph

78. Civil Rights Act 1964

79. Voting Rights Act 1965

80. 36% registered 1964

81. 65% registered 1969

82. 300 black mayors 1965

83. 300 black mayors 1980

84. 72 black reps 1965

85. 4200 black reps 1987

86. </3>

87. “We had breakfast while we were waiting for the rain to stop, and I [was] sitting with the [Indianapolis] Clowns in a restaurant behind Griffith Stadium and hearing them break all the plates in the kitchen after we were finished eating. What a horrible sound.

88. Even as a kid, the irony of it hit me: here we were in the capital in the land of freedom and equality, and they had to destroy the plates that had touched the forks that had been in the mouths of black men. If dogs had eaten off those plates, they’d have washed them.”

89. “There was often a hate letter or two in the mail, and I was always concerned about Barbara and the kids being abused when they went to the ballpark….

90. “You can hit all dem home runs over dem short fences, but you can’t take that black off yo’ face.”

91. Returning to the South took some of the boy from Mobile out of me, and replaced it with a man who was weary of the way things were.

92. I was tired of being invisible.

93. “I was the equal of any ballplayer in the world, damn it, and if nobody was going to give me my due, it was time to grab for it.” – Henry Aaron

94. “[W]e shouldn’t have to say black lives matter. We should be able to take it for granted. In the 1780s the British Society for the Abolition of Slavery adopted as its official seal a woodcut of a kneeling slave above a banner that read, ‘Am I Not A Man And A Brother?’

95. More than a hundred years later, black sanitation workers in the Poor People’s Campaign answered the slave’s question with signs worn around their necks that read: ‘I Am A Man.’” – Michelle Alexander December, 2015

96. February 24th, 2018

97. 0:25

98. 3:50

99. “Ain’t much matter what happens tomorrow, ‘cause we men, ain’t we?”

100. “I was a changed being after that fight…I was nothing before; I was a MAN NOW.”