East Tennessee State University Digital Commons @ East Tennessee State University Electronic Theses and Dissertations Student Works 8-2001 Fight the Power: Protest, Showdown and Civil Rights Activity in Three Southern Cities, 1960-1965. Kyle Thomas Scanlan East Tennessee State University Follow this and additional works at: https://dc.edu/etd Part of the History Commons Recommended Citation Scanlan, Kyle Thomas, "Fight the Power: Protest, Showdown and Civil Rights Activity in Three Southern Cities, 1960-1965. Electronic Theses and Dissertations.edu/etd/117 This Thesis - Open Access is brought to you for free and open access by the Student Works at Digital Commons @ East Tennessee State University. It has been accepted for inclusion in Electronic Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of Digital Commons @ East Tennessee State University.
For more information, please contact digilib@etsu. Fight the Power: Protest, Showdown and Civil Rights Activity in Three Southern Cities 1960-1965. _______________ A thesis presented to the faculty of the Department of History East Tennessee State University _______________ In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree Master of Arts in History ________________ by Kyle T. Scanlan August 2001 ________________ Dr.
Elwood Watson, Chair Dr. Henry Antkiewicz Dr. Dale Schmitt ______________ Keywords: Civil Rights Movement, Martin Luther King, SCLC, SNCC ABSTRACT Fight the Power: Protest, Showdown and Civil Rights Activity in Three Southern Cities, 1960-1965 by Kyle T. Scanlan This thesis describes the significant events of the Civil Rights Movement from 1960 to 1965, examining the campaigns of Albany, Georgia in 1962, Birmingham, Alabama in 1963, and Selma, Alabama in 1965.
In the wake of the Freedom Rides of 1960-61, Martin Luther King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference was looking for a way to dramatically reveal the racial injustice of the South. Stumbling into a campaign in Albany, SCLC found the right method in the use of nonviolent direct action. While Albany was a failure, it was this campaign that led to the campaigns of Birmingham and Selma, which resulted in the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Through confrontation with law enforcement, SCLC was able to effect meaningful social change.
The research for this thesis included both primary and secondary sources. Newspaper accounts, especially from the New York Times, were used as well as magazine articles. All three main chapters contain accounts by the participants, activists, and politicians. The conclusion from the research would indicate that it was through the use of confrontation with Southern law enforcement that the Civil Rights Movement was able to force the federal government act on civil rights legislation.
2 DEDICATION This thesis is dedicated to Dr. Peake, the man who first taught me the wonder of the Civil Rights Movement and just how vital and meaningful Dr. King’s dream is. 3 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would first like to thank my Thesis Advisor, Dr.
Elwood Watson, for his help and guidance in completing this project. I would also like to thank my friends for lending their support and providing an outlet when things looked bleak. Also, thanks to my father, for his help, both financial and otherwise, to aid in making this project a reality. And finally I would like to thank Max Hermann for providing the employment and patience that allowed me to not starve as I completed this thesis.
4 CONTENTS Page ABSTRACT. ONE SHREWD YET RETROGRADE SHERIFF. CONFRONTATION IN THE STREETS. AIN'T GONNA LET NO ONE TURN ME ROUND.99 5 CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION The Civil Rights Movement in the United States essentially began the same time that the country did.
Beginning with the Abolitionist movement to end the “peculiar institution” of slavery, through the Civil War and Reconstruction, and into the Industrial Age, the United States has always grappled with the problem of race. In his 1903 classic study on race relations, The Souls of Black Folk, Dr. DuBois wrote that, “the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color line.”1 DuBois was not far off in his assessment. During this century race had become the number one social ill in the nation.
It was disguised as class struggles, economic woes, wars and manifested itself in other forms. There were many valiant attempts during the Twentieth Century to improve the state of race relations, but all of them were doomed to minimal success. DuBois and Booker T. Washington were both great leaders, but their squabbling over methods and ideology derailed many of their best 1 WEB DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk (Chicago: A.
McClurge and Co. Marcus Garvey, the flamboyant leader of the UNIA (United Negro Improvement Association), had one of the largest followings of any Black leaders in the history of the United States, but rampant corruption within his organization coupled with the chronic investigations and his eventual imprisonment by the federal government ended his career. All of these leaders were unable to see their goals reach fruition. Decades would pass before the desolate plight of Black Americans would etch itself into American society.
In the 1950s, a series of several victories in the courts engineered by Thurgood Marshall and the NAACP Legal Defense Fund culminated in the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka decision seemed to open the floodgates for change.2 The case, which struck down the 1896 precedent of “separate but equal”, established in the case of Plessy v. Ferguson3 marked the beginning of the erosion of entrenched systematized segregation. This decision was really the beginning of the modern Civil Rights Movement, marked with effective protest and actual results.
7 Ashmore went as far as to say, “without the Brown decision, there would have been no Civil Rights Movement.”4 The Montgomery Bus Boycott in 1955-56 was one of the earliest events in the modern Civil Rights Movement. Under the leadership of MIA (Montgomery Improvement Association) President Martin Luther King Jr. Blacks used the nonviolent resistance technique of a mass boycott on the city bus system. After a protracted campaign, the Montgomery Improvement Association forced the end of segregation on public transit in the city.
King, who was quite interested in social justice and equality, saw that he had the model for bringing about the end of Jim Crow in the South. Meanwhile in Little Rock, tensions were building in 1957 as Arkansas attempted to comply with the Brown decision. That fall, as the plan of integration was being carried out, violence erupted. President Eisenhower was forced to federalize the Arkansas National Guard and call in regular US Army troops to allow nine teenage children the right to attend school.
Due to the shorter time span of events and the confrontational spectacle that erupted, this made for greater public exposure for television cameras. It 4 Harry Ashmore, Civil Rights and Wrongs: A Memoir of Race and Politics, 1944-1994, (New York: Pantheon Books, 1994), 96. 8 was Little Rock that first placed the burgeoning Civil Rights Movement dramatically into the nation’s living rooms, and it was this campaign that gave King an education on how to manipulate the modern media to aid his efforts. With the arrival of television, King saw that his philosophy of nonviolent resistance had a natural ally.
The point of nonviolence is to protest injustice and oppression while at the same time rising above the temptation to uselessly fight back violently in a battle that cannot be won. With the aid of television, King hoped to build on the lessons of Montgomery and Little Rock and use nonviolent resistance tactics to educate the nation to the racial injustice that was rampant in the South. Then, with the nation suitably outraged, the government would be forced into protecting the rights of Black Americans. Vilifying local Southern authority as the bad guys on television would allow victory for the movement.
The years from 1960 to 1965 were the high water mark of the modern Civil Rights Movement. Under the leadership of Dr. King’s organization, SCLC, (the Southern Christian Leadership Conference), the Movement managed to change the nation. 9 In 1962 in Albany, Georgia, SCLC and SNCC (the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee) attempted to wage the first large scale campaign to secure integration of public facilities and voting rights in the city.
Here, the Movement was met with defeat due to the skillful, yet, retograde intelligence of Sheriff Laurie Prichett. Prichett was well schooled in the methods of Martin Luther King and was well aware of King’s use of Gandhian tactics. The Albany Sheriff knew what the campaign was designed to do, provoke him and his men into violence, thus Prichett used nonviolence to combat nonviolence, therefore, stymieing the efforts of King and his supporters. King knew that in the wake of failure at Albany, the Movement needed to do something profound in 1963.
Little could he have dreamed that it was the events of that year that would result in Congress passing the following year meaningful civil rights legislation for the first time since Reconstruction. In 1963, SCLC decided to implement a campaign in Birmingham, Alabama. Here they met their desired result, as police chief Bull Connor reacted in the manner SCLC anticipated. The mass arrests of protesters were accompanied by the use of fire hoses and police dogs, and the nation watched the coverage on television, stunned.
10 Violence got so bad that President Kennedy was forced to station troops in various parts of the state to be used if the situation did not calm down. By the summer of 1963, with Kennedy’s Civil Rights Bill on the floor of Congress, civil rights organizations staged the March on Washington to apply pressure to the government. With 250,000 marchers standing in front of the Lincoln Memorial, King gave his legendary “I Have a Dream” speech. That September, tragedy once again occurred in Birmingham, as a bomb killed four Black girls at the 16th Street Baptist Church.
Violence erupted, and by the end of the day six people were dead. In November 1963 John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas and Lyndon Johnson became President. Johnson’s legislative skills aided in passing Kennedy’s bill, and in 1964, President Johnson signed into law the Civil Rights Act of 1964.5 On the heels of a victory in Birmingham, King’s next focus was voting rights.
While launching the statewide Alabama Project, SCLC decided to stage a campaign in Selma, Alabama. Dallas County Sheriff Jim Clark harbored many of the racist values of Bull Connor, and once again SCLC planned on exposing the violence of the police to demonstrate the evils of Jim Crow. In this campaign, the 11 movement was emphasizing the injustice of being deprived of the right to vote. The campaign went smoothly until March 7, 1965.
While beginning a planned march to the state capital, the marchers were routed by police with tear gas, cattle prods, and billy clubs. “Bloody Sunday” was the turning point. The march went on, and as President Johnson was forced to get involved, he decided that the time was now right to force a voting rights bill through Congress. His Administration had been stalling on sending more civil rights legislation to Congress, but Johnson decided that King had given him a perfect opportunity to pass a voting rights bill.
The President turned out to be correct, and on August 6, 1965, Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act of 1965.6 These events changed the lives of all Americans. Due to the combination of good leadership, determination, influence, as well as intense coverage by the media, segregation faced a severe setback in the American South. 12 CHAPTER 2 ONE SHREWD, YET RETROGRADE SHERIFF Martin Luther King, Jr. formed the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) in 1957 in the hope that the future that held the dissolution of racial equality.
King, fresh off the victory of the Montgomery Bus Boycott, had an ultimate objective, racial justice, and he had a refined method of nonviolent resistance that he intended to employ. However, what King lacked was a specific area in which to implement these plans.