The Strruggle Continues Civil Rights Quizlet

They moved closer and closer. ... Somebody started yelling. ... I tried to see a friendly face somewhere in the crowd—someone who maybe could help. I looked into the face of an old woman and it seemed a kind face, but when I looked at her again, she spat on me.

What followed the bus boycott was a period of quiet and uncertainty lasting for three years or so. This was true of the Civil Rights movement. It was true of Montgomery and most of the South, with the odd exception. And it was true of King himself.

The Civil Rights movement seemed to languish. There were organizational struggles. The NAACP, led by Roy Wilkins, fell out of favor with many, who wanted more action and fewer costly legal battles. The S outhern C hristian L eadership C onference ( SCLC ) was founded immediately following the successful conclusion of the Montgomery boycott (January 10-11, 1957) by sixty Black ministers and civil rights leaders. MLK was made its president. Its mandate was to end segregation and to work to get Blacks registered to vote. But it suffered from a lack of money and a lack of enthusiasm among Blacks to join an organization whose very formation was a rebuke to the NAACP.

King himself went through an unusually quiet period until the end of the decade. The bus boycott had driven him to epic heights of leadership and action, and he felt a natural letdown afterwards. For some time he felt purposeless, and questioned his mission. He was nationally known and gave speaking and preaching engagements all over the United States. But he came to feel uneasy about this practice. Always hard on himself, he saw preaching as a kind of drug which gave him an "in the moment" high, but left him listless for some days afterward - until he could preach again.

King came out of his funk after some time and devoted a great amount of energy to studying and mastering Gandhi's non-violent techniques of opposition. He knew that fighting fire with fire would be disastrous in a South where the Klan still operated with impunity - as an example they would be granted a permit to march through the Atlanta courthouse in 1960 in full regalia at a time when King himself was on trial and tensions were at a peak. Violent dissent would be smashed utterly. So King studied non-violence and the SCLC adopted it as the main tactic in accomplishing their goals.

And Montgomery itself did not capitalize on the success of the buses. After the short period of violence was over, they conspicuously rode the buses for a while, sitting wherever they chose. But soon they drifted back into a sort of submission, willingly taking seats at the back of buses. By 1958, one could have taken a snapshot of the interior of a Montgomery bus and it would not have looked much changed from one taken, say, in 1955.

There were signs that white Southerners were alert to a movement that would unsettle decades of unchallenged power. They were alert for confrontation and impatient with political leadership that they saw as insufficiently tough on "uppity Negroes". They were ready for a bloodletting and a most interesting opportunity came at Little Rock, Arkansas in the fall of 1957.

The Supreme Court case Brown vs Board of Education (1954) had established without the least ambiguity the obligation to desegregate schools. There was some serious foot dragging in response. The Arkansas government enthusiastically agreed - a year later - to integrate the schools, and set in motion a plan that would come to fruition in 1957. Nine students were selected by the NAACP to register for the 1957-58 school year at the previous all-white Central High School. The plan, drawn up by school superintendent Virgil Blossom, stretched out total compliance over a suspiciously long time frame. The finished document showed that the Board of Education would tiptoe towards total desegregation somewhere around 1963. The plan to mingle whites and blacks in Arkansas' schools would, in theory, take just a year less than it took men to walk on the moon after President Kennedy's decree started that momentously complex enterprise in motion.

Enter Governor Orval Faubus, who had his own enterprising agenda.

He ordered the Arkansas State Guard out in force on the first day of school, ostensibly to protect the incoming students. (This announcement alone served as an invitation card for thuggish whites to show up.) However their real orders were to keep the students out , on the theory that there was " imminent danger of tumult, riot and breach of peace ".

Upon hearing of this, President Eisenhower weighed the issue carefully. He was a curious combination of a man who was deeply honorable, unquestionably courageous, yet, if not racist, a close facsimile of it. He had spent forty years in the American Army, had led the D-Day invasion that gave the Allies a footprint in Europe, allowing them to eventually overrun Germany, yet in all of that time had had no use for integrated units. Now that he was President, his secretaries sometimes winced as he recounted the latest n****r joke.

But he was not about to be bullied by a jumped-up Governor. He secured an order from a federal judge that the school be desegregated successfully and gave Faubus one day to meet the order. Amazingly, on September 4 the students were turned away for a second time. The State Guard failed in the face of an angry mob.

Eisenhower was enraged. He called in his Defense Secretary and asked him how long it would take to get the best division for riot control to Little Rock. Charles Erwin Wilson, who had been following the crisis closely, smiled broadly and replied that it could be done in a day. Eisenhower immediately sent out an order which a) federalized the Arkansas National Guard and b) ordered 1000 National Guard troops to Little Rock.

Needless to say Faubus was brought to heel and the Arkansas Nine entered without physical harm the next day. There was a large white crowd, but they held themselves in check this time, no doubt after a careful consideration and then abandonment of their previous motives for keeping Negro children out. It was curious, but the picture below perhaps shows the "assistance" they were given in re-thinking their ideas on race.

Unfortunately the story doesn't have a particularly happy ending. The students were harassed the entire year by other students and the Little Rock Central faculty somehow missed much of the intimidation. The following anecdote is one of dozens collected by the Southern Poverty Law Center.

A group of white girls followed Minnijean Brown through the hallways of Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, stepping on her heels until they bled, spitting at her, telling her she stinks, saying she was ugly and calling her the N-word.
After nearly a week of this racist bullying, it finally went too far. As Brown was about to enter her homeroom, one of the girls threw a purse full of combination locks and struck her in the head. Responding to this painful assault, Brown threw down the purse and said, "Leave me alone, white trash."

For that, she was expelled from school. The girls who attacked her suffered no consequence.

However, there was one unique feature. This was the first time such ugliness had been televised nationally. The degradation hit the conscience of millions of Americans hard. It prepared them somewhat for the brutality that lay ahead.

All in all though, the end of the decade was the quiet before the storm that would shake America to its roots, awaken the political conscience of a great many American leaders, and create a vastly changed landscape for Black people in America. Non-violence would be tested, improved, tried again and eventually perfected, against the orgy of civic violence that was to come between 1961 and 1964.

And those three years would see a young boy set out on a career that would eventually make him The Lion of the U.S. House Representatives, the conscience of that Body and the living embodiment of his adage - Make Good Trouble . It's time now to get acquainted with John L. Lewis.

He did not have the most prepossessing beginning of life. Where Martin Luther King was born into clerical royalty in Atlanta, John Lewis started life on a farm near Troy, Alabama. He was the third of ten children. His parents were sharecroppers in nearby Pike County.

John did not take at all to farming, telling his parents that it was a sin against the land. He had no interest in any animals whatsoever - except for chickens. By the age of five, he was preaching to any chickens still enough to catch his mangled syntax. Whenever chicken was served for supper, Lewis confronted his parents and then boycotted the meal.

Gradually his religious work with chickens widened, as he took to baptizing them. As much fervor as he had to "save" the souls of his chickens, he occasionally let his enthusiasm get the better of his judgment. One of his most traumatic memories through life was the day he held a chicken too long underwater, and when he finally pulled it up, discovered it was lifeless.
But baptized, nonetheless.

Lewis had some schooling which he remembers warmly. He wrote " I had a wonderful teacher in elementary school, and she told me 'read my child, read! " He did struggle with reading, but kept at it.

Unfortunately, it led to an unpleasant, but typical Alabama experience. " I loved books. I remember in 1956, when I was 16 years old, with some of my brothers and sisters and cousins, going down to the public library, trying to get a library card, and we were told the library was for whites only and not for coloreds. "

When he was 16, he heard Martin Luther King preach on the radio. He was spellbound and later that year followed the details of the Montgomery Bus Boycott avidly.

At 18 he applied to Troy University and the admission was declined. By this times his horizons had broadened greatly. He had traveled to meet Rosa Parks when he was 17, and at 18 he did the same to meet MLK. He told King of his university plight. King advised him that while he could sue the university for discrimination, it might endanger his family. Lewis took his advice and enrolled at an H istorically B lack U niversity ( HSB ), Within a few years, he had graduated from the American Baptist Theological Seminary in Nashville and prepared to start a career as a preacher. He impressed King with his single-mindedness.

Here Lewis intersects with the next major part of the Civil Rights story, which will be told in the next article. It all started with a sit-in by 4 students at a Woolworth's cafeteria in Greensboro, North Carolina. The action became a movement, and the movement demanded a formal organization. Thus was born the S tudent N on-Violent C o-ordinating C ommittee ( SNCC - pronounced SNIK ).

When the movement spread, Lewis participated in Nashville. Eventually he joined SNCC and his career as an activist was on.

The next article will show how the Civil Rights Movement accelerated tremendously, beginning with the Greensboro 4 - college students who decided on February 1, 1960, to spontaneously sit down at a popular lunch counter, just like the whites did. And they ordered some tasty Woolworths food. To their astonishment, they were served.
It was an astonishing lesson to their elders, who were wrapped up in theory and severe political in-fighting by this point, and were fast losing their ability to act. The sustained drive towards integration was kick-started. It would be long and bloody. The smiles you see below were seldom seen thereafter on the faces of African American activists and their idealistic white counterparts, as they confronted the worst of human nature, and endured it without responding in kind.

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Source: https://eodonnell.substack.com/p/civil-rights-the-struggle-continues

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