ABSTRACT
At the dawn of the twentieth century African-American leader W. E. B. DuBois wrote, ‘through all the sorrow of the Sorrow Songs there breathes a hope – a faith in the ultimate justice of things’.1
Black southerners lived with the daily injustice of legally sanctioned segregation and ubiquitous racial oppression. Traditional narratives have viewed the period leading up to the Second World War as one dominated by African-American quiescence in the strictly enforced apartheid of the South. Certainly the unforgiving grip of white supremacy severely constricted the advancement of black southerners in this period. They continued, however, to breathe the hope to which DuBois referred. Black resistance and protest in many differing forms brought slow and tentative progress towards an end to racial injustice. By the 1940s cracks in the foundations of the ‘solid South’ had begun to show through.2 African-American men and women had begun to carve tiny chinks of hope in the great mountain of despair. It was this action that provided the genesis of the civil rights movement. This movement played a key role in the evolving parameters of American citizenship and will be explored from a number of different angles in this and the following two chapters. Traditional accounts of the civil rights struggle in America focus on
a specific time period dominated by the 1950s and 1960s. Manning Marable argues that a ‘Second Reconstruction’ began in February 1960 with the first sit-in and, like the first Reconstruction, saw a ‘series of massive confrontations concerning the status of the Afro-American … in the nation’s economic, social and political institutions’.3 Taylor Branch, in Parting the Waters, focusses on ‘America in the King years’ which he designates as 1954-63. In his concluding comments Branch argues, ‘Kennedy’s murder marked the arrival of the freedom surge, just as King’s own death four years hence marked its demise.’4 In his survey of the fight for black equality from 1890 to 2000, Adam
Fairclough devotes three chapters to the ‘non-violent rebellion’ starting in 1955 and ending with the signing of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. He then examines the rise and fall of Black Power, beginning in 1965 and ending with the first years of the Nixon administration.5
Marable’s central chapters are entitled ‘We Shall Overcome, 1954-60’ and ‘Black Power, 1965-70’.6 The civil rights movement has therefore been traditionally framed as the period from the Brown decision to the collapse of non-violent resistance at the hands of a rising militancy and Black Power agenda. This provides the dominant narrative of the civil rights movement. There are, however, dangers associated with such a narrative. Jac-
quelyn Dowd Hall argues that by limiting the civil rights struggle ‘to a single halcyon decade, and to limited, non-economic objectives, the master narrative simultaneously elevates and diminishes the movement’.7 Hall argues for a different chronology, for a ‘long civil rights movement’ which provides a more complex and complete picture of race relations stretching back to the 1930s. Indeed the forerunners in the fight for civil rights in the 1950s and 1960s can be observed even earlier than this decade. The tactics of the civil rights struggle and the will to engage in them was not simply a post-1945 phenomenon. The purpose of this chapter is not to diminish the importance of those efforts associated with traditional accounts of the civil rights movement but instead to show where their roots lay and that the black struggle for justice was a long-term process – one which continues today. Indeed one conception of a civil rights movement could be traced
right back to the Reconstruction era. The unprecedented federal power exercised in this period and the attempts to grant and protect black citizenship in the Thirteenth, Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments was a beginning. The effort to enjoy the full measure of these rights was the focus of a civil rights struggle which spanned the century after the 1860s. It was the liberal interpretation of the Reconstruction amendments by the Warren Court in the 1950s and 1960s which breathed life into the civil rights movement of those decades. We need to move the traditional chronological parameters of the struggle for equality in order to fully appreciate the wider narrative of the civil rights movement. As such the following pages will focus on the first half of the twentieth century, showing an important and often overlooked phase of the story of this movement. As mentioned above 1954 is often regarded as the starting point of
the modern civil rights movement. In that year the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People (NAACP) won a landmark decision in Brown v. Board of Education which found that separate but equal educational facilities were unconstitutional. This began the slow
dismantling of Jim Crow segregation. Within two years of the Brown decision Martin Luther King was catapulted onto the national stage and based his campaign for civil rights on shaming America to live up to its ideals, appealing to the soul of the nation and the conscience of its white population. The roots of these developments, however, can be traced back to the early twentieth century. Founded in 1909, the NAACP had been chipping away at the wall of legal segregation for decades before Brown and like King’s the organisation’s message was a moral one. In its tenth annual report the Association laid out its goal to ‘reach the conscience of America’.8
