A future generation, in retrospect, might have recognized the symptoms of creeping fascism that marked the Peekskill affair: hatred wrapped in the banner of patriotism; collusion of business interests, nativists, and racists; incitement by high officials and the media; and exaltation of violence as a redemptive force. African Americans remembered Peekskill as the acceleration of the powerful currents of tyranny that they would have to confront even more assiduously in years to come.
1949–1954
THE ROAD TO BROWN V. BOARD OF EDUCATION
Sherrilyn Ifill
In 1948 U.S. officials vigorously prosecuted German war criminals in Nuremberg for enforcing anti-Semitic policies, practices, and laws that advanced a theory of ethnic and religious inferiority of Jews. At the same time, state officials across the American South were enforcing segregationist policies, practices, and laws that advanced a theory of white supremacy and the racial inferiority of African Americans, undisturbed by the federal government.
In the small town of Hearne, Texas, starting in the fall of 1947, the contrast between the U.S. fight against Nazism abroad and its embrace of a rigid racial caste system at home was dramatized in a battle over segregated schools. The standoff between African American parents in Hearne and the local white school superintendent drew the attention of Thurgood Marshall. Just eight years earlier the brilliant and determined young African American lawyer from Baltimore had founded the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund (LDF). Marshall became the LDF’s first president and its director-counsel in 1940. Seventy-three years later, I became the LDF’s seventh president and director-counsel.
The story of LDF’s brilliant strategy to successfully challenge the constitutionality of racial segregation has been documented and chronicled in multiple books and articles. The strategy culminated in Brown v. Board of Education, a monumental 1954 landmark legal decision that literally changed the course of twentieth-century America. The Supreme Court, led by Chief Justice Earl Warren, decided that “separate educational facilities are inherently unequal” and deprive Black children of the constitutional right to equal protection of the laws. The decision cracked the load-bearing wall of legal segregation. Within ten years, the principles vindicated in Brown were successfully deployed to challenge segregation laws in the United States.
The rather unknown story that unfolded in Hearne, Texas, captures the historical significance of Brown. Black parents were powerfully affected by the contrast between the U.S. stance against Nazis on the global stage and the embrace of Jim Crow at home. Their postwar ambitions for their children ran headlong into the determination of Southern whites to reinforce segregation. In communities around the South, Black parents sought and received the assistance of local NAACP lawyers to challenge the absence of school facilities for their children, or substandard educational facilities and investment in Black schools.
In Hearne the challenge was initiated by C. G. Jennings, the stepfather of thirteen-year-old twins, Doris Raye and Doris Faye Jennings. In August 1947, he tried to register his daughters at the white high school. His request was refused, and he engaged local counsel.
A few weeks later, in September 1947, African American parents initiated a mass boycott. Maceo Smith, who led the NAACP in Dallas, contacted Marshall about the situation in Hearne.
A year earlier, the Blackshear School, the high school designated for Black students, had burned down. No one expected the Black students to now attend the nearby white school due to a Texas law segregating students. The school superintendent announced that $300,000 would be devoted to the construction of a new school for Black students, and a $70,000 bond issue was placed on the ballot. Although Black children outnumbered white students in Hearne, the physical plant of the existing high school for white students was estimated to have a value of $3.5 million. The building that would be haphazardly renovated into the “new” Black high school was, in fact, the dilapidated barracks that had just recently housed German soldiers during the war.
When Black parents learned about the city’s plans, they felt compelled to take matters into their own hands. According to reports in the local African American newspaper, “these buildings were sawed in half, dragged to the school location, and joined together with no apparent regard for physical beauty or concealing their prison camp appearance.” The complaint later filed by parents in Jennings v. Hearne Independent School District further described the school as “a fire hazard,” “overcrowded and…unfurnished with modern equipment,” and with “inadequate lighting.” All in all, the Black parents deemed the building “unsafe for occupancy,” and the indignity of educating their children in a prisoner of war barracks was an insult too ugly to be borne.
White officials and local newspapers disparaged the parents’ school boycott and the Jennings suit as an attempt by the NAACP to “stir up trouble.” On September 28, Thurgood Marshall—who recognized the importance of challenging media distortions to his litigation efforts—fired back at the editorial board of The Dallas Morning News with a lengthy letter.
As African American parents in Hearne kept their children home from school, one hundred miles away in Houston, Black schoolteacher Henry Eman Doyle was the sole law student registered at Texas State University for Negroes, a hastily organized three-room “school” created by the State of Texas after Marshall won a case brought on behalf of Heman Sweatt, a Black student who had been barred from registering at the University of Texas Law School. The three-room school, located in the basement of the state capitol, was the state’s attempt to comply with the Plessy v. Ferguson “separate but equal” doctrine that required states to provide a public law school for Black students if they excluded Black students from flagship public law schools.
Marshall took his challenge to federal court, and in 1950 the Supreme Court would find that Texas’s crude attempts were in vain, and that at least in the area of law education, separate could not be equal. Sweatt is widely regarded as the final case that set the successful stage for the frontal attack on segregation that became Brown v. Board of Education.
Meanwhile, some federal judges found the courage to defy Southern mores and uphold the constitutional guarantee of equal protection. In South Carolina, federal court judge Julius Waties Waring, the scion of a respected Charleston family with deep Confederate roots, issued a series of decisions in cases tried by Marshall that suggested that federal judges might play a role in protecting civil rights. Waring’s searing, powerful dissent in Briggs v. Elliot, the South Carolina Brown case, became the template for the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown. Here Judge Waring first articulated the concept that “segregation is per se inequality”—a full-on rebuke of Plessy v. Ferguson that Chief Justice Warren later paraphrased in Brown.
But civil rights lawyers, and the African American parents they represented, were also emboldened after World War II. And it was their energy and uncompromising demands that shifted the landscape. By 1951, African American students were making their own demands. In Prince Edward County, Virginia, sixteen-year-old Barbara Johns led her classmates at Moton High School in a walkout and boycott of their segregated school. Her action prodded Marshall and the LDF lawyers to file Davis v. Prince Edward County, Virginia, one of the four Brown cases.
Back in Hearne, by the time African American parents began organizing to challenge the dilapidated “new” high school for their children, Marshall already had his hands full with cases, all of which would become landmarks in their own right. This may be in part why the Hearne case is not widely known. It was one of a cadre of small, unsuccessful cases extending back to Marshall’s late 1930s schoolteacher-pay-equality cases in Maryland and Virginia. But these cases played a powerful role in shaping the thinking of LDF lawyers about what was possible in their litigation challenging Jim Crow. And it powerfully demonstrated the civil rights challenge confronting the United States in those early postwar years. As Thurgood Marshall wrote in his 1948 lett
er to the editors of The Dallas Morning News, “I think that before this country takes up the position that I must demand complete equality of right of citizens of all other countries throughout the world, we must first demonstrate our good faith by showing that in this country our Negro Americans are recognized as full citizens with complete equality.”
1954–1959
BLACK ARTS
Imani Perry
On May 17, 1954, the axis of American history shifted when the unanimous Supreme Court opinion in Brown v. Board of Education declared that separate was in fact not equal, and that legally mandated segregation was unconstitutional. It was front-page news around the world, and the opinion was printed in full in American papers.
Desegregation would prove an arduous process, marked by violence and unapologetic resistance in many corners of white America. Nevertheless, the Brown decision had immediate significance because it indicated that finally, after decades of aversion and refusal, the Supreme Court would be on the side of the Fourteenth Amendment. The decision concluded a hard-fought multidecade legal strategy by the NAACP. The victory fueled the coming two decades of African American protest and organizing and America’s second Reconstruction.
Brown fueled not only Black activists but also Black artists who explored social conditions and the human imagination necessary to transform them. In prior years, many Black artists had been chastened and chastised by McCarthyism. Black artists were among those blacklisted for holding leftist politics or simply for being outspoken against American racism. Organizations were fractured and shuttered, and careers were destroyed. Black art communities were subject to surveillance, closed doors, and punitive measures.
And so in 1954, Black artists and writers found themselves at something of a crossroads. McCarthyism was waning. Brown was a beginning, and the FBI surveillance of Black activists under the COINTELPRO program had not yet begun. Possibility, however fraught, was refreshed. And these artists claimed new space.
In November 1955, James Baldwin followed two novels, Go Tell It on the Mountain and Giovanni’s Room, with a collection of essays, Notes of a Native Son. The book fairly crackled with his refusal to apologize for who he was and where he came from. The essays were both autobiographical and critical. His pen was unflinching.
In the first section, Baldwin took his predecessors to task. He subjected Harriet Beecher Stowe, Richard Wright, and the filmmakers who made Carmen Jones to withering critiques for their too-narrow depictions of Black life, thought, and feeling. Baldwin sought to claim the expansiveness he saw in Black history and culture. In the second section of the book, he depicted the conditions of Black life, North and South, including Jim Crow in Princeton, New Jersey. Baldwin placed himself as a global figure, in France and Switzerland. Unfamiliar ground gave him a sense of solidarity with other oppressed peoples and nuanced his and his readers’ understanding of race and racism as a global problem.
This drive to expand the terrain of Black humanity in the public sphere was evident in the work of other artists. Elizabeth Catlett, already recognized as an exceptional visual artist who worked largely in prints, began to sculpt in the 1950s. A graduate of Howard University and the child of a Tuskegee professor, Catlett had settled in Mexico to escape the tentacles of McCarthyism. She had been scrutinized and harassed more than most in retaliation against her leftist politics. And she did not break. She sculpted smooth, sensual, and solemn pieces, and her fully rounded Black subjects—both of historic significance and of the folk—grew under her hands. Her landmark 1957 print Sharecropper is the image of a Black woman—serious and dignified—beneath a hat shielding her from the sun. Niña depicts a Mexican girl in profile, with the brown skin of an Indigenous child and her hair in plaits. In both prints, along with many other works, Catlett wove together key elements of her artistic imagination—a fight against economic exploitation, sexism, and racism—with unseen yet quintessentially American faces.
Black American artists of the 1950s found common ground and purpose with Black artists abroad. In 1958 the Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe published Things Fall Apart, considered one of the most important and widely read novels in the English language. Published two years before Nigerian independence, the novel tells a story of the infiltration and domination of the West at the dawn of colonialism. Achebe’s protagonist, Okonkwo, a man with a clear history and place in his Ibo community, confronts the world-destroying forces of the colonial order and the missionaries who served as the moral justification for British incursion. The anticolonial novel had a global impact. It also brought Achebe into contact with Baldwin and the playwright Lorraine Hansberry.
Baldwin’s younger but similarly genius friend, a protector and a thinking partner, Lorraine Hansberry transformed American theater in March 1959. Her play A Raisin in the Sun was the first written by a Black woman to be produced on Broadway. It was a runaway success, and that year Hansberry won the Drama Critics Circle Award. The play tells the story of a Chicago South Side family living in a squalid kitchenette apartment whose patriarch has died, leaving them with a $10,000 insurance check. The question of what to do with the check is the primary plot device.
Around it, Hansberry crafts a masterful ensemble of characters who dream in the face of a deeply racist society. The title of the play comes from Langston Hughes’s poem “Harlem,” also colloquially known by its introductory question, “What happens to a dream deferred?” Each character lives with that prospect. Walter Lee Younger longs for wealth and status of the sort he sees in the lives of the white men he drives around. His wife, Ruth, is a domestic worker who is contemplating an abortion and is desperate for a home of her own. Beneatha, Walter’s younger sister, aspires to be a doctor and is also exploring her identity and the idea of freedom in part by means of a West African suitor, a student in the independence movement. And the elder Lena, Walter and Beneatha’s mother, betrays every Mammy stereotype with the force of her moral guidance and her reminder that freedom is the purpose of life.
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 p
revious 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.
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