“Power concedes nothing without a demand. . . . It never did, and it never will.”

— Frederick Douglass

Civil Rights: Civil Rights: 1940s to 1940s to

Little RockLittle Rock

Civil Rights in the Early Civil Rights in the Early Holocene EpochHolocene Epoch

Read Gaillard, Cradle of Freedom, 75-116, 135-177, 195-206

Read Lawson / Payne, eds., Debating, 82-87, 159-167

Homework:Homework:

Agency, Action, Inaction, and Movement Building

• What actions were civil rights activists justified in using to achieve social justice?

• How did representatives of “The State” respond to the civil rights movement, and how did they justify those responses?

• How does a social movement -- and attendant social, political, economic change -- “happen”?

“Until justice rolls down like waters, and righteousness like a mighty stream.”

-- Martin Luther King, Jr., echoing the prophet Amos

Hallowed GroundHallowed Ground

Addie Mae Collins

Cynthia Wesley

Denise McNair

Carole Robertson

4 Little Girls4 Little Girls

10

The Rise of Segregation: The Strange Career of “Jim Crow”

Three Pillars of White Supremacy

• Segregation

• Voter disfranchisement

• Extralegal violence and use of criminal justice system [concept of “legal lynching”]

12

Voter Disfranchisement

13

The Scourge of Lynching

14

. . . and “Race Riots”

1940-19541940-1954

Was there a Was there a

New Deal New Deal for blacks?for blacks?

Charles White.The Return of the Soldier, 1946.Pen and ink on illustration board.Prints and Photographs Division.Reproduction Number: LC-USZC4-4886 (8-19)

19541954

Agency and the Brown cases:

From “nibbling around the edges”

to a full frontal assault

Lynching, Lynching, the Sexual “Color Line,” the Sexual “Color Line,”

and a and a Culture of ViolenceCulture of Violence

The Banner hanging with depressing regularity outside of the NAACP offices in New York City in the early decades of the

20th century

Halloween 2001

19551955

“I want the whole world to see what they did to my baby. . . .”

19551955

• nature of “direct action”

• ideology

• strategy

• tactics

• boycotts [withholding patronage, economic boycotts, etc.]

Sign indicating demarcation of segregated seating on Birmingham city bus during the Jim Crow era

Sign indicating demarcation of segregated seating on Birmingham city bus during the Jim Crow era

Mythology and Mythology and SpontaneitySpontaneity

E.D. Nixon and Rosa Parks

Martin Luther King, Peter Seeger, Charis Horton, Rosa Parks, and Ralph Abernathy

at Highlander Folk School’s 25th Reunion, 1957

Forgotten Faces Forgotten Faces and Eventsand Events

Claudette Colvin

JoAnn Robinson

of the Women’s Political

Council (WPC) in Montgomery

1953 Baton Rouge Bus Boycott Carpool System

Tallahassee Bus Boycott, 1956

19571957ALPHABET SOUP:

NAACP (1909)FOR (1914-1915) / CORE (1942)

SCLC (1957)

19571957

Revisiting Revisiting “with all “with all

deliberate speed”deliberate speed”

Little Rock 9 with Daisy Bates

(September 13, 1957)—The Little Rock Nine study on their own after being denied admission to Little Rock Central High School.

Black newsman Alex Wilson attacked by the mob outside Little Rock’s Central High School

Arkansas Governor

Orval Faubus

President Dwight D. Eisenhower

May 29, 1958 -- Ernest Green is the first black to graduate from Central High.

Elizabeth Eckford and Hazel Massery

MediaMediaWhat role do the media play

in shaping perceptions of a social movement and its antagonists?

See notes: Norman Rockwell, “The Problem We All Live With”

6 year-old Ruby Bridges, depicted as she desegregrated an all-white New Orleans elementary school in 1960

in Norman Rockwell’s painting “The Problem We All Live With”

"At a time when we face grave situations abroad because of the hatred that communism bears towards a system of government based on human rights, it would be difficult to exaggerate the harm that is being done to the prestige and influence and indeed to the safety of our nation and the world. Our enemies are gloating over this incident and using it everywhere to misrepresent our whole nation."

-- Dwight Eisenhower, 24th September, 1957, in a nationally-televised address

Truth and Truth and ReconciliationReconciliation

Elizabeth Eckford, Hazel Massery,

and Grace Lorch (not pictured)

19601960

Arkansas Governor

Orval Faubus

North Carolina Senator Sam

Ervin, master of “featherbed resistance”

Alabama’s George Wallace:

From racial “moderate” to diehard

segregationist