The Jim Crow Laws and Racism in United States History (9 page)

Sheriff Clark had different ideas. Knowing the marchers would have to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge over the Alabama River, Clark deputized most white men over the age of twenty-one to meet them. When the marchers tried to cross the bridge, whites attacked them with baseball bats, clubs, and tear gas. The thwarted march became known as Bloody Sunday.

White segregationists won the battle. But they were losing the war. Television cameras captured the violent event. Among those watching were ministers around the nation.

Martin Luther King, Jr., invited them for another march. On March 9, several hundred clergymen crossed the Pettus Bridge in a symbolic gesture. When the troopers met them, they returned to Selma. That night, white segregationists attacked one of the ministers. Reverend Jesse Reeb died two days later.

Meanwhile, a confrontation was taking place in the courtroom. Demonstrators, seeking to overrule the order against demonstrations, appeared before federal Judge Frank Johnson. They showed him television footage of Bloody Sunday. John Lewis, one of those who was beaten, testified.

President Lyndon Johnson broadcast a nationwide television address on March 11. He claimed it was “wrong—deadly wrong” to deny American citizens their voting rights.
⁵
The speech brought results. On March 20, Judge Johnson overturned Hare’s injunction. President Johnson sent seventy deputy marshals to join Alabama National Guard members in protecting the marchers.

Once again, on March 21, the demonstrators proceeded. This time, the marchers numbered in the thousands. Whites took shots at them along their four-day journey. But more than thirty thousand people, black and white, joined in for the last three miles of the fifty-four-mile trek.

Chapter 10

VIOLENCE AND VICTORY

Jim Crow was finally dying. Alabama Governor George Wallace in 1963 declared, “Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, and segregation forever.”
¹
But the people who favored segregation were fighting a losing battle. The courts were against them. Thanks to the nationwide exposure of television, public opinion was against them. Some white Southerners fought back with the only weapon they had left—violence.

Emmett Till

It was supposed to be a relaxing summer vacation. Fourteen-year-old Emmett Till and his cousin, Curtis Jones, went from Chicago to rural Mississippi in 1955. Before Till left, his mother warned him to be careful, because customs were different in the South.

One day, Till and his cousin went to a grocery store. The owner’s wife was tending the store by herself. It is not certain what Till did, but the woman considered it an improper advance. When her husband found out, he and his brother went to Curtis Jones’s great-uncle’s house and demanded “the boy from Chicago.”
²
They took Till away and killed him. Three days later, his mutilated body was found.

Emmett Till’s body was shipped back to Chicago. His mother demanded an open casket funeral, so that others could see the brutality of his murder. Black newspapers made this a front-page story for weeks. One civil rights leader commented, “There’d been killings like this for centuries, but times were changing. This was big news. Even in foreign countries, people wanted to know why a black boy had been murdered just for being fresh.”
³

The accused killers went to trial that September. It took an all-white jury little more than an hour to acquit them. Although both men were acquitted, the community never really forgave them for the disgrace they had caused. Both eventually moved away.

Other Violence

They called it “Freedom Summer.” Whites and blacks from the North went to the South in 1964 to help blacks register to vote. Mississippi, which had a reputation as the most racist state in the Union, was a particular target.

New York residents Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman went to Meridian, Mississippi. There, they joined James Chaney, a black civil rights worker. On June 21, they left for Philadelphia, in Neshoba County. Ku Klux Klan members had burned a church there the week before. All three knew the risks involved. Schwerner warned, “One must keep in mind that Neshoba is very ‘tough’ country.”
⁴

When they reached Philadelphia at about 3:00 P.M., a deputy sheriff stopped and hassled them. Seven hours later, the three were released. Another deputy sheriff stopped them about ten miles outside of town and turned them over to a white mob. They were never seen alive again.

An informer tipped off the FBI about the killings. A month after they were reported missing, the bodies of Goodman, Chaney, and Schwerner were found underneath a makeshift dam. The killers were brought to trial. The Supreme Court upheld their convictions in 1970.

Even top-ranking civil rights leaders faced extreme danger every day. Medgar Evers was the NAACP field secretary for Mississippi in 1963. Noted historian David Halberstam called Evers “perhaps the bravest man in America.”
⁵
As he was returning home on the night of June 12, a sniper shot him. He died almost instantly. Even though Byron Beckwith bragged of having killed Evers, a jury at first acquitted him. He was not convicted until more than thirty years later.

“I would like to live a long life . . . but I’m not concerned about that now,” said Martin Luther King, Jr., at a rally for striking Memphis sanitation workers on April 3, 1968. “I’ve seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. . . .”
⁶
Seldom have words been more prophetic. King was shot to death the following evening. His assassination set off riots in cities throughout the United States.

“ . . . the Promised Land”

Violence did not lead to long-term gains for those who favored segregation. If anything, reaction against the violence helped blacks and whites who favored integration.

Two constitutional amendments helped secure black voting rights. The Twenty-third Amendment, adopted in 1961, allowed residents of the mostly black District of Columbia to vote in presidential elections. Three years later, the Twenty-fourth Amendment became part of the Constitution. It forbade states from requiring poll taxes for presidential elections. President Lyndon Johnson called the amendment “a triumph of liberty over restriction.”
⁷
In 1964, a sweeping civil rights law outlawed segregation and discrimination in jobs, public accommodations, education, and voting. It also created the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC).

Activists Jamie Lee Jackson, James Reeb, and others did not die in vain. Five months after the Selma demonstrations in 1965, President Lyndon Johnson signed a voting rights act. This law suspended literacy tests in Southern states where fewer than 50 percent of adults had voted the year before. It also provided federal supervision of elections, to assure that African Americans were not kept from the polls.

Another civil rights bill was passed shortly after King’s death in 1968. This one prevented discrimination in the sale or rental of most housing.

“We as a people will get to the promised land,” Martin Luther King proclaimed just before he was assassinated.
⁸
If he meant total equality in education or employment opportunities, that promised land has still not been reached. But at long last, the Jim Crow era is over, and all Americans—white, black, or any other race—are considered equal in the eyes of the law.

TIMELINE

1865
—Former slaves are freed at end of Civil War.

1865–1866
—Southern states enact Black Codes, repressive laws against African Americans.

1867
—Congress passes the Reconstruction Act.

1868
—All citizens are given equal rights under newly ratified Fourteenth Amendment.

1870
—Mississippi’s Hiram Revels becomes the first black United States senator.

1875
—A major civil rights act forbids discrimination in public accommodations.

1877
—A specially appointed panel gives Republican Rutherford B. Hayes the votes needed to become president; After taking office, Hayes removes troops from the South, ending Reconstruction.

1883
—Supreme Court rules the 1875 Civil Rights Act unconstitutional.

1895
—Booker T. Washington’s “Cast down your bucket” speech helps make him the most powerful African American in the country.

1896
—
Plessy
v.
Ferguson
Supreme Court verdict establishes the “separate but equal” doctrine.

1905
—W.E.B. Du Bois organizes the Niagara Movement, which calls for an end to segregation.

1909
—A New York City conference establishes the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).

1915
—Hit film
Birth of a Nation
sparks a revival of the Ku Klux Klan.

1916–1919
—Half a million Southern blacks go north in a movement called the Great Migration.

1954
—
Brown
v.
Board of Education
verdict forbids segregation in public schools.

1955–1956
—Black residents of Montgomery, Alabama, stage a massive bus boycott.

1957
—Black students, guarded by federal troops, integrate Little Rock’s Central High School.

1960
—Students in Greensboro, North Carolina, begin the first of a series of “sit-ins.”

1961
—Freedom Riders escape after violence in Alabama cities.

1963
—Martin Luther King, Jr., delivers his famous “I have a dream” speech before a huge civil rights demonstration in Washington, D.C.

1964—Twenty-fourth Amendment outlaws poll taxes in federal elections; A sweeping civil rights bill makes discrimination in public accommodations illegal.

1965
—Voting Rights Act permits federal supervision of Southern elections.

1968
—Fair Housing Act prevents discrimination in sale or rental of most housing; Martin Luther King, Jr., is assassinated.

CHAPTER NOTES

Chapter 1
. “The Most Important Decision”

1
. Leonard A. Stevens,
Equal! The Case of Integration vs. Jim Crow
(New York: Coward, McCann, and Geohagen, 1976), p. 130.

2
. David Halberstam,
The Fifties
(New York: Fawcett Columbine, 1993), p. 414.

3
. Bernard Schwartz,
A History of the Supreme Court
(New York: Oxford University, 1993), pp. 305–306.

4
. Ibid.

5
. Halberstam, p. 424.

6
. Schwartz, p. 307.

7
. Stevens, p. 131.

8
. Clayborne Carson et al., eds.,
The Eyes on the Prize Civil Rights Reader
(New York: Viking Penguin, 1991), p. 36.

Chapter 2
. Less-Than-Free Freedmen

1
. Berman E. Johnson,
The Dream Deferred: A Survey of Black America 1840–1896
(Dubuque, Iowa: Kendall/Hunt, 1993), p. 88.

2
. Claude G. Bowers,
The Tragic Era: The Revolution After Lincoln
(Cambridge, Mass.: Houghton Mifflin, 1929), p. 309.

3
. Eric Foner,
Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution
(New York: Harper and Row, 1988), p. 342.

4
. Ibid., p. 429.

5
. Ibid., p. 427.

6
. Kenneth M. Stampp,
The Era of Reconstruction, 1865–1877
(New York: Vintage Books, 1965), p. 4.

7
. William J. Ridings, Jr., and Stewart B. McIver,
Rating the Presidents: A Ranking of U.S. Leaders, from the Great and Honorable to the Dishonest and Incompetent
(New York: Citadel, 1997), p. 130.

8
. Bernard Schwartz,
A History of the Supreme Court
(New York: Oxford, 1993), p. 167.

9
. Leonard A. Stevens,
Equal! The Case of Integration vs. Jim Crow
(New York: Coward, McCann, and Geohagen, 1976), p. 37.

Chapter 3
. Life Under Jim Crow

1
. Marion Figgs, producer/director,
Ethnic Notions: Black People in White Minds
(California Newsreel, 1987).

2
.
Take Me to Chicago The Promised Land
(Discovery, British Broadcasting Corporation, 1989).

3
. W.E.B. Du Bois,
Souls of Black Folk
, quoted in Leon F. Litwack,
Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998), p. 240.

4
. Pauli Murray, Proud Shoes:
The Story of an American Family
, quoted in Litwack,
Trouble in Mind
, p. 217.