Yaolee Chen
3. The Civil Rights Movement
From 1957 until 1961 the Southern Christian Leadership Conference drifted without much purpose, proposing voter registration drives and offering belated assistance to student activists following the sit-ins and the Freedom Rides. Yet, by 1965, the SCLC had successfully gained the attention from the white elites to change their poor housing condition and to provide them better educational opportunities. In a compare of the Civil Rights Movement Pre-1965, the Civil Right Movement Post-1965 had been a failure because it failed to end the poverty in the black communities.
Before 1965, the white policemen often used violence to attack the blacks. Years before the spring demonstrations of 1963, T. Eugene “Bull” Connor symbolized Birmingham. The popular commissioner of public safety had consistently won reelection since 1937 as a union busting, segregation defender of public virtue. He received the electoral support of the white lower middle class that dominated local politics. Since 1950s, the TVs were introduced into the families of the white middle class. Elvis Presley preached a racial struggle in his music (a combining of the black Jazz music of the 1920s with the blue song of the whites). Being educated by the TVs, the young generation of the blacks and whites asserted the black cultures should be a part of the American society. But because the blacks were often poor and uneducated the white policemen considered them were inferiors. Like Bull Connor’s constituency, he felt threatened by the postwar changes occurring in Birmingham. Although the outcome of a series of police scandals persuaded him not to seek a fifth term ill 1953, lie responded to the emerging civil rights movement by riding the rising discontent of a frustrated lower-status white electorate back into office in 1957. His power base eroded, Connor nonetheless promised to resist the black demand for an end to racial discrimination in the marketplace.
The Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights cast aside vocal protestations and rhetorical resolutions for dangerous physical contact with the white power structure from the local to the nation wide. Carried by the Associated Press across the world, the snapshot of the brutal treatment of the Freedom Riders confirmed Birmingham’s national reputation as a racially intolerant Tom Langston’s famous photograph of the Freedom Ride riot in the Birmingham Trailways station on Mother’s Day, May 14, 1961, helped shift white elite opinion against Bull Connor. Then the division began among the white elites. Some kept biting at the blacks, while other white people (white women particularly), felt shame about their own behaviors. The sit-ins spread out nation wide. During April 1963, more than three hundred integrationists from the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights and black student associations had faced arrest after participating in sit-ins at downtown lunch counters, picketing in department stores, and marching in illegal parades. In every strike, the black young men behaved more bravery, and the punishment altered from brutal to even bloody.
The non-violence strikes by 1965 in Birmingham were yet count to be successfully. The ambiguous resolution had been achieved within the confines of federalism, but in the tumultuous months following Birmingham, as civil rights protests rocked cities across America, it became clear to the Kennedy administration that legislation was necessary to achieve desegregation in the South. Consequently, the victory in Birmingham evolved into the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which opened the system to African Americans even in recalcitrant places such as the steel city—Chicago.
In the year of 1965, Martin Luther King, Jr. announced that the SCLC had selected Chicago as the target of its first northern campaign. From late 1965 to mid-1967, King and SCLC teamed up with Al Raby (he later became the leader of the Chicago Freedom Movement) and the Coordinating Council of Community Organization (CCCO), a federation of local civil rights groups, to form the Chicago Freedom Movement, an enterprise determined to root out racial injustice, particularly housing discrimination, in Chicago, to improve the quality of life for the city’s black residents, and to prod the nation as a whole to combat urban ills.
Originally, King and SCLC hoped the launching a northern nonviolent campaign could offer hope to the “teeming millions of Negroes hovered in ghettoes” and steer them away from destructive violence [1]. In early August 1966, angry whites had terrorized peaceful civil rights demonstrators as they marched through white neighborhoods to dramatize the depth of housing discrimination. To many observers and participants, it must have seemed as if the scripts of the Birmingham and Selma campaigns had been recycled[2]. But the strikers in Chicago were loosing more (about their safety, life, and the rights of liberalism) than those that in Birmingham. In August 1966, as the victims continued to march, The Chicago police beefed up their protection of the marchers so that there would be no recurrence of the terrible Southwest Side violence. The policemen believed the inferior race shouldn’t take the equal housing opportunities for granted. The white belligerence also shocked many in positions of power across the nation. The marchers were simply attempting to raise and expose to the nation the truth about discriminatory housing practices so that the public – churches, government, and individuals—would demand change in law and practice[3]. The white elites debated over the morality of the civil rights movement itself; by 1968, the American society ran out of order because of the disagreement among the white elites behind the revolts. In a general evaluation of the Civil Rights Movement after 1965, the movement had hindered the Democratic liberalism to success. As Martin Luther King also agreed: The impact of the summer of 1996 did not prove to be a springboard for a new Chicago. The task of transforming the Midwestern city, he confessed in early 1967, was “greater than even we imagined”[4]. Nor did the Palmer House accord revitalize the quest for racial justice. The subsequent months were a time of decline, not renewal, for both the Chicago movement and the national civil rights movement.
The Chicago crusade was clearly not the great triumph that the Selma and Birmingham campaigns had been. It failed to rouse the national conscience, to spark the passage of sweeping legislation, or to electrify the nonviolent civil rights movement. On the local level, too, the Chicago Freedom Movement did not accomplish its professed goals. Despite numerous achievements, it failed to “end the slums” or to make Chicago an “open city.”
In the 1990s, the ghetto dwellers speak wistfully about how much better their neighborhoods were three decades ago. Then, at least, industry, businesses, and representatives of the black middle class could be found in places like North Lawndale, East Garfield Park, and Kenwood-Oakland. Now these communities are largely the preserve of people mired in poverty, hostage to a poor school system and besieged by rampant crime and drugs. I consider the civil order collapsed in Birmingham, Alabama, when Bull Connor’s fire hosed and police dogs failed to control the thousands of African American activists and schoolchildren in 1963. And today the order is worse that the dwellers lived in the ghetto and the policemen could do nothing to help them out of the discrimination which the non-violence activist wanted to improve pre-1965.
[1] Trotter, Black Milwaukee: The Making of an Industrial Proletariat, 1915-1945 ( Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1985), pp. 264-282.4. Fairclough, "'State of the Art," p. 393.
[2] Elijah Anderson, A Place on the Corner ( Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978).135.
[3] an American Friends Service Committee
officer told a congressional subcommittee in Washington.
[4] Stalemate in Chicago1). MLK speech, 28 Aug. 1966, MLK speech file, MLK Library, Atlanta.2). CSM, 14 March 1967, page. 9. 3). LAT, 27 Aug. 1966, page. 1, 5; NYT, 27 Aug. 1966, page. 1, 17; CA, 27 Aug. 1966