Direct action by students started in Atlanta after the year the bus cases were decided, 1960. Sit-ins and picket lines were organized by small groups working independently of any formal leadership. Eventually though, the students took their ideas and strategies to older leaders like Dr. Mays and myself. Both of us had concerns about the dangers involved. But Dr. Mays had been much more in touch then with events in places like Greensboro, North Carolina, where the sit-ins began, and told the young people to push forth with his blessings.
Hartsfield asked several of us to request the students to curtail the demonstrations for a month. Federal desegregation orders were being delivered to the Atlanta school system. That was going to build up some steam. Some of us disagreed in responding. Others said they’d work to set up a plan along those lines, which would have retained a few largely symbolic demonstrations instead of picketing and sit-ins. I didn’t feel we could ask the students to do that. Any reduction of the size of their organizational efforts would appear to be a setback. And the students did react. Lonnie King, their leader and a former Morehouse student, vehemently opposed any changes in the direct-action programs that did not come from the activists themselves. He added some characterizations of the Voters’ League members that were particularly uncalled for. When I tried to talk with him, we ended up heatedly denouncing each other. He was bullheaded and I was ready to compromise.
I wanted to compromise because that was the only way anybody in this thing was ever going to move. People had to start measuring what they were willing to give up, because it was time for just that. But if the whites gave up any part of segregation, they were going to be looking to save face on the issue. It was the thought of being humiliated that kept so many whites in the die-hard camp of segregation, I believe. Just the thought of having to say, Listen, I was wrong, let me make it up, was just too much. So the whole matter went out into the streets.
Many people in Atlanta had hoped that the bus-desegregation effort of 1957 would serve as the model for future civil-rights action in the city. But younger Negroes, especially the students of the Atlanta University System, were deeply impressed by the dynamic quality of the sit-in demonstrations that took place first in Greensboro, North Carolina, and then began to spread throughout the South. It was inevitable that this form of protest would reach Atlanta, although there was still considerable resistance to the direct-action process among both black and whites here.
During the early weeks of 1960, Lonnie King organized a group called the Committee on Appeal for Human Rights. In the beginning COAHR was content to follow the bus-desegregation model in its protests, and avoided any major confrontations with the white community. Until May of that year, Lonnie King was able to organize several marches and one sit-in at a local store without creating any situation that promoted violence. For a while the feeling was that Atlanta, true to many of its previous examples, would be able to offer change to the people without the overly dramatic encounters that were taking place in other southern cities. But these hopes were naïve. In mounting the first protests, Lonnie King had taken advice and counsel from the more experienced black leaders in the city. And because of that original relationship with us, integration plans were even supported, indirectly, by Hartsfield and Atlanta Police Chief Jenkins, who during these early protests instructed members of the force to arrest no one unless it became completely unavoidable. Had this mood been sustained, transitions from a segregated situation toward progress in racial matters might have been achieved without incident.
But at the state level there was not much of the sophistication that could be seen developing, however slowly, in Atlanta. The Georgia legislature, reacting, it seemed, to the vast amount of publicity Greensboro had received, passed an anti-trespass law in February. By enacting what they thought would be regarded as a show of strength, the lawmakers created another fortress to be attacked. By setting up another arrest mechanism, which said that the businessmen in town could have demonstrators picked up by police for not leaving a public place immediately when requested to do so by the owner, the Georgia state senators and representatives allowed a situation that was under control, partially at least, to grow completely out of hand. The students could see that whites intended to drown in the tide of history rather than give up the old ways that had kept them afloat in the past. Even the State Attorney General, Eugene Cook, insisted that Georgia was going to protect “individuals and their private rights.” By individuals, he meant whites only. By private rights, he meant none that Negroes were assumed to have.
The attempt to integrate lunch counters that was spreading in the South was just a symbol, of course, but a clear one. There was great potential in this effort for addressing the larger issues, calmly, without hysteria, if the lunch counters could be seen in a proper perspective. But some reactions in the Negro community created tension between older and younger people.
C. A. Scott antagonized some of the students in the movement when he took to the editorial pages of his paper, the Atlanta Daily World, to call for more emphasis on “eliminating segregation in education . . . [along with] more voting and political influence; equal consideration in the administration of justice [as well as] improved economic opportunity . . .”
To the students, this was an empty viewpoint; it sounded reasonable but meant very little. Nothing in what Scott was telling them had a concrete issue at the center. The lunch counters, however insignificant they might have seemed to a man like Scott, who didn’t use them anyway, were very real to the Negroes who were being humiliated every day because they could only afford such facilities for a snack or a meal when they were in the city’s business areas. The students had also been growing up in a new atmosphere, one that many older Negroes were unfamiliar with. It wasn’t lost on the younger people that the Supreme Court had been clear on the matter of school desegregation some six years earlier. To them, this was a long enough time to wait for a general action on the part of all people, an action to bring about all the changes America had been promising.
Lonnie King decided to model some demonstrations in Atlanta on the Greensboro sit-ins, and he formed a planning body with several Morehouse students, among them a young fellow named Julian Bond. Eventually, King and Bond were joined by another Morehouse man, Joe Pierce, in the planning of Atlanta’s direct-action project.
Before moving ahead with their plans, the three young men visited Dr. Mays at Morehouse. He questioned only whether they felt able to handle such a project, and when assured by them that they could, he urged them to move on with it, with his full backing. Even then King, Bond, and Pierce didn’t jump forward recklessly. They sought participation from others in the university. Presidents of the other member colleges couldn’t back away from a time that clearly had come, but not all of them were quite as supportive as Dr. Mays. Later, he would graciously suggest that the other university heads had been with their students on the protest plans. But while the authority figures at Atlanta University never came right out with a rejection of what their young scholars wanted to do, some did stress to the students, over and over again, that college life was to focus on education. Anything else, some of the college presidents insisted, constituted little more than distraction. But even if they were somewhat reluctantly favorable, the leaders of A. U. were never so intimidated by possible white reaction that they expelled or otherwise pressured their students, which is the way it was in several black institutions across the South.
A dialogue was opened between the younger and older black factions in Atlanta, and out of the regular meetings they held throughout the winter months came a very new sense of political and social coalition. In addition to the students, men like Whitney Young, then Dean of the Atlanta School of Social Work, and Dr. Albert Manley, of Spelman College, used their experience as both educators and administrators to bring a solid foundation to the expression of Negro dissatisfaction with the southern condition.
Early in March of 1960 a statement by COAHR appeared. It was called �
��An Appeal for Human Rights,” and was published by both of the city’s white daily papers, the Journal and the Constitution, as well as by C. A. Scott’s Atlanta Daily World. Lonnie King’s group had been joined by representatives of the six member institutions of Atlanta University, the Urban League, and the NAACP in calling for an end to the segregated society southerners took for granted as a permanent condition. The appeal made it clear that freedom was the goal of those who had signed, nothing more and nothing less. Lonnie King’s people were speaking out for their rights as American citizens and as human beings.
White response was largely stupid and irresponsible. Ernest Vandiver, the governor of Georgia, labeled the appeal a Communist-inspired piece of rabble-rousing. He went on to say that no such thing as injustice existed in the city of Atlanta where, after all, so many Negroes owned homes and ran their own businesses. Some whites didn’t speak out the way the governor did, but his sentiments had a lot of support in Atlanta, throughout the state, and in the rest of the South. Within the Negro community, a new sense of unity between younger and older people quickly developed. Those of us who had become more economically secure than others knew that money and social position didn’t drive bigotry out of the lives of black people. Many Negroes who had seen an attitude among young folks that seemed too aggressive, too outspoken, were now recognizing the need for that sort of youthful energy and daring.
Not everybody in the Negro community was convinced of this, however. C. A. Scott had printed the appeal in his paper with some misgivings. He flatly rejected direct-action demonstrations as lawlessness that would never achieve what electoral politics were bound to bring about in time. I believed in that process, too, but I felt it was now too late for us to depend on the ballot box exclusively in our efforts to change the South.
Many of the students had lost all faith in voting as a means to an end. Those who still believed were weary from their many disappointments with politicians and their empty promises. Two clear paths had developed before us. I didn’t feel, however, that they had to be walked separately. In order to integrate our society, we were going to have to integrate our strategies. Many of Atlanta’s veteran activists rejected this notion. The NAACP and the Urban League adamantly refused to back direct action, preferring to keep matters in the courts. Scott placed a wedge between himself and the student groups when he called their demonstrations foolish and editorialized in his newspaper: “. . . it seems necessary to refuse to make an issue at this time over some of the less essential questions . . .”
The students and their leaders, Lonnie King in particular, were angered by what they considered a put-down of their efforts to integrate lunch counters and other public facilities in town. Scott was trying, though, to make a very important point when he wrote in the same editorial that the emphasis in the struggle now had to be applied to “. . . the elimination of segregation in education; more voting and political influence; equal consideration in the administration of justice . . . and improved economic opportunity.”
Contrary to the beliefs of some people in Atlanta, Scott was never—at least in my view—opposed to the students’ goals, only to their tactics. And in this, he was far from alone. The confusion came, I feel, because some of the students did not view the demonstrations as a means for developing court cases, while others did. There were those who felt that disruption was not just a style but a philosophy within the movement. Disagreement over this issue remained central to the Civil Rights Movement and often divided it into several angry camps. Negotiations were challenged by direct action. Churches became seriously disrupted by differing attitudes within congregations. Where I chose to be involved—even when I did not always agree with those I joined with to continue the struggle—the Ebenezer family was right along with me. Many members had children in college, youngsters who were taking an active part in the demonstrations that would soon be seen around the world.
Direct action in Atlanta was rooted in nonviolence. Lonnie King’s leadership emphasized orderly, disciplined conduct by the demonstrators, whose restraint in the face of relentless provocation would remain unwavering. It was difficult. The name-calling and the threats were clear and obvious. But it was the hatred that whites directed at them that I think will remain with so many of the students for all of their lives. Their question was perhaps the same as mine for so many more years than most of the students had been on earth: Why? What could there possibly be that twisted the faces of housewives and office workers into masks of fury and murderous rage? This anger and rage frightened many of the students much more than fear for their personal safety. All of us had to wonder just what sort of people integration was going to bring Negroes into contact with. And shortly after the publication of the Appeal for Human Rights, a Federal District Court ruling helped create even more tension throughout the city.
NAACP officials had requested a court order to require the Atlanta school board to start integration efforts through a pupil-placement plan. The court delayed the order for one year, from the fall of 1959 to the fall of 1960. Several days later, on March 15, 1960, Lonnie King and the student members of COAHR conducted a sit-in at several public places in downtown Atlanta, including several cafeterias in federal office buildings. Seventy-seven demonstrators were arrested by both the city police and several county officials.
Reaction came quickly from both the black and white communities. Now that the appeal was being exercised as a plan of action, those who had praised it showered the students with stern criticism.
Editorial writers in the white press claimed the Negro cause had been set back. To where? some of us wondered. The newspapers also began to suggest somewhat regularly that school integration could only be delayed while these demonstrations continued . . . if they did.
Hartsfield now found himself in the position of having to speak out against all future demonstrations and other forms of direct action. Few Negroes in Atlanta were unmindful of the mayor’s reputation as a moderate on racial issues. Black voters had supported him for more than a dozen years. But we now realized that even Hartsfield was unable to see what was developing, what had to happen. Asking us to pull back the demonstrations was like asking us to push rain back up into the sky. Somehow people in Atlanta had been convinced that the appeal would end all that the sit-in movement had come to represent. But young people had watched the bus-integration plan go into effect in Atlanta only after nearly two years of legal maneuvering. Nobody could wait that long again. And so when I was asked to stand bail for some of those arrested, the new day was upon me. White businessmen dug in and took a hard line. Some of them swore that Negroes would never eat in the white downtown restaurants, or even be able to enter the doors of some other establishments. Hartsfield urged several of us to curtail the direct-action projects that were in the planning stages. Police Chief Herbert Jenkins went to the Morehouse campus to assure students that Atlanta’s police force would act with restraint during demonstrations.
I think it would be fair to say that by 1960, the major concern of most white southerners in cities like Atlanta was the matter of school integration. Little Rock and the massive resistance to integration that whites mounted there in 1957, when the President of the United States had to call out troops to maintain order in that city, was a serious reminder of just how much emotion was still involved in the process of ending segregation. Throughout the spring of 1960, the NAACP had pressed its suit to have the Atlanta school system begin the pupil-placement plan. The school board continued its appeal to the court, asking a one-year delay. In the spring, when a decision was to be handed down, demonstrations were continuing in downtown Atlanta. Just a few weeks earlier, in April, M.L. had spoken to a student gathering at Spelman College. These demonstrations, he told the crowd, must serve as a signal to all America that sitting in at lunch counters is just a beginning of our march for full freedom.
M.L. was now moving rapidly ahead toward the national leadership of a growing Civil Rights Movement that would soon be sweepin
g the nation. Many cheered him that night. But not everyone, I’m sure, knew just how much he’d really prophesied.
THIRTEEN
Nineteen sixty—a new decade, and another beginning for me. I was happy—M.L. was coming back to Atlanta! At the end of each phase of his education, I had tried to get him to join me in the pulpit at Ebenezer, but M.L. had always listened politely and patiently to my arguments and said, “No, Dad, not yet.”
Now he and Coretta had spent five years at Dexter. They had enjoyed a beautiful and fulfilling experience in their first pastorate, and I thanked God for that. M.L. had successfully led the Montgomery Bus Boycott, which began as a local issue and drew national, then international attention. It also spawned other bus boycotts in the South, which led a group of clergy in 1957 to the founding of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.
M.L. was elected president of SCLC, having no idea that the demands and responsibilities of the organization would increase as quickly as they did. He seemed to be on a marathon speaking schedule. His travel schedule was grueling, and more than once I said to him, “M.L., I don’t see how you do it! You can’t keep this pace going!” Because Atlanta continued to be the transportation hub of the South, he was constantly in the city making plane connections, and I began to think there might be some truth to the saying, “Even if you are going to heaven, you’ve got to come through Atlanta.” The Southern Christian Leadership Conference was a national organization, and would continue to grow, with its headquarters in Atlanta, so M.L. accepted the call to come to Ebenezer as co-pastor with me.
So much had happened during these years. Early in 1955, Rosa Parks, returning home from a tiring day’s work, refused to give up her seat on a city bus in Montgomery. She was arrested and the boycott that would bring world attention to Alabama began shortly afterward. Negroes had been abused, even shot, by Montgomery bus drivers. Incidents had been reported over many years. But whites there thought these things would pass by quietly, that Negroes in that part of America were too afraid to try to do anything about the conditions they had to live under. They were wrong, of course, and in being found out as people who were wrong, whites, in many instances, also became frightened. In 1956 my son’s home in Montgomery was bombed while he was away at a rally. His wife and baby were inside, but fortunately were unhurt. Bunch received this news and was deeply pained by it. She wanted M.L. out of the movement right then. But I knew he would leave only when he felt he had accomplished what he set out to do. He’d grown up that way.
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