At the conclusion to the play, the Younger family moves into a home in a white neighborhood. They aren’t wanted there and are almost certain to encounter violent retaliation for claiming a place in the American landscape. The family is heroic in their insistence on facing the mobs, reminding the audience of the question at the heart of the American project: is equality a deliberate fiction or an end for which people will fight?
These works by Baldwin, Catlett, Achebe, Hansberry, and others provide a glimpse of the moment after the Brown decision. All these artists were accustomed to loss: the grief of lives cruelly limited by racism, sexism, homophobia, and imperialism. But they insisted that Black life was not mere endurance but a victory of spirit in the form of human complexity, imagination, resistance, breadth, and depth, precisely the resources that were essential for the coming revolutions.
1959–1964
THE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT
Charles E. Cobb, Jr.
A critically important aspect of the freedom struggle that intensified in the 1960s was the convergence of young people with people the ages of their parents and grandparents who were willing to share their networks and experiences. In some respects, this has always been true but in my view never more so than during the 1960s.
How did this happen, and why was it important?
On February 1, 1960, four eighteen-year-old students attending North Carolina Agricultural and Technical College (now University), in Greensboro, walked into an F. W. Woolworth department store. After purchasing a few school items, they sat down at the lunch counter and tried to order soft drinks and doughnuts. They were denied service, but they refused to leave. They remained seated at the counter until the store closed. The next day more students returned to sit in, and within two months sit-ins involving thousands were unfolding in some thirty Southern cities, largely emanating from historically Black colleges and universities.
There had been similar protests in previous decades, most recently in 1957 at the Royal Ice Cream Parlor in Durham, North Carolina. In 1935 Howard University student Kenneth Clark, the psychologist who would become famous because of his instrumental work in the Brown v. Board of Education case, was arrested while protesting with fellow students against segregated restaurants in Washington, D.C. In 1943 Howard University law student Pauli Murray led university women in protest against segregated restaurants near her campus. In 1950 Mary Church Terrell led protests against segregation that included a sit-in at Thompson’s Restaurant in downtown Washington, D.C. The Montgomery Bus Boycott took place from 1955 to 1956. But the Greensboro sit-ins and those that followed would have far greater impact in battering the walls of segregation.
The sit-ins did two things. They gave rise to the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), and they revitalized—with Black student energy—the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), which in 1960 was largely northern and largely white. More than most, as they evolved, these two organizations pushed forward the old tradition of grassroots community organizing. After all, enslaved Africans had not sat in at plantation manor dining rooms or marched in nonviolent protest on auction blocks. Rather, they had organized escapes, secret schools, rebellions, sabotages, and work slowdowns, and sometimes even assassinations, which was one of the biggest fears of white owners living on plantations and being served their meals by enslaved Black people.
Ella Baker, someone who should be much better known, was critical in the organizing that emerged from the sit-ins. Her activism brought together generations of Black struggle. The 1960 surge in youth activism drew her immediate attention. Recognizing that the activist leaders did not know one another, she decided they needed to meet and exchange ideas. On Easter weekend in 1960, she brought them together for a student leadership conference, held at Shaw University in Raleigh, North Carolina. She had received $800 for this purpose from Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., who was also very conscious of this new wave of young activism. King wanted to see the formation of a student wing to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), an organization he had formed after the Montgomery Bus Boycott. Baker was the SCLC’s temporary executive director and one of the South’s most respected political organizers. As the NAACP director of branches in the 1940s, she had organized chapters throughout the region.
Almost from the opening of the conference, she suggested to the student leaders that they might want to consider forming their own organization. She had long been uncomfortable with the male supremacist attitude found among many in the SCLC leadership and was on the way out of the organization.
More important than her discontent over how the SCLC responded to her suggestions and ideas because she was a woman, she was also disappointed at the SCLC’s lack of commitment to community organizing, notwithstanding Septima Clark’s Citizenship School program. Leadership was top-down. As Reverend King said following his selection as pastor of Dexter Avenue Church in Montgomery, Alabama, “Authority flows from the pulpit to the pew, not from the pew to the pulpit.”
“You have begun something that is bigger than a hamburger,” Ella Baker told the conference in her opening address. To make real change, she stressed, you must organize from the bottom up, empowering those at the bottom. Years later, elaborating on leadership, she would say,
In government service and political life I have always felt it was a handicap for oppressed people to depend so largely on a leader, because unfortunately in our culture, the charismatic leader usually becomes a leader because he has found a spot in the public limelight….There is also the danger in our culture that, because a person is called upon to give public statements and is acclaimed by the establishment, such a person gets to the point of believing he is the movement…and they don’t do the work of actually organizing people.
The emphasis on community organizing does not diminish the importance of legal strategies such as those that led to the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision or the lobbying of Congress. Other currents, such as the effects of World War II, certainly shaped the civil rights struggle in this era as well.
Ella Baker was the most important influence on SNCC’s movement into the organizing that powered Black struggle in the South. In less than a year, a small core of students left their college campuses to work as full-time organizers in the Black Belt South. In many instances, they traveled in the network Baker had built as NAACP director of branches. A similar process was under way with CORE, especially in Louisiana and North Carolina. And in the rural counties of the Black Belt, these young “field secretaries” quickly learned that to most who lived there, restaurant desegregation was unimportant. In the Black Belt, gaining power to control their lives meant gaining the vote, which seemed to offer the best path toward change and empowerment.
The rampant violence that organizers from SNCC and CORE encountered as they attempted to mobilize and organize for voting rights is still largely untold. It was not the kind of violence wielded against the marches in Selma or Birmingham but rather assassinations and bombings in out-of-the-way places that never commanded press attention. It included beatings on the steps of county courthouses.