A Different Day Page 23
A key component of this strategy was nonviolent direct action, a technique that had been pioneered by CORE in the early 1940s. The Congress of Racial Equality grew out of the religious and pacifist Fellowship of Reconciliation, whose members remained opposed to violence for any reason even during the worldwide fight against Nazism. Arguing that the use of violence to solve social problems could only lead to more violence, CORE members attacked racist discrimination in northern cities by peacefully “sitting in” at segregated facilities. In the 1950s CORE worked with the SCLC to organize workshops that would teach nonviolence to black southerners. Veteran activist Bayard Rustin explained that the purpose of the training sessions was “to bring the Gandhian philosophy and tactic to the masses of Negroes in the South.” Rustin perceived a growing tendency among African Americans to fight back against white supremacists’ acts of aggression and feared that this might lead to “widespread racial conflict.” He and other national spokes-people insisted that, for practical if not philosophical reasons, civil rights activists must remain nonviolent.85
The student sit-in movement of the late 1950s and early 1960s seemed to vindicate this approach. Well-dressed, educated young black people walked into “white only” lunch counters and restaurants and politely requested service, refusing to move until their requests were granted. Though they were insulted, spat upon, assaulted, and arrested, they did not respond aggressively to the actions of their tormentors. White proprietors in many cities eventually succumbed to the pressure to desegregate their facilities. CORE leader James Robinson stated that the sit-ins showed “the power of Satyagraha—soul force” and argued that the social order could be changed through “a spirit of good will and understanding.”86 Newspaper reporters, radio commentators, and television crews were fascinated by the extraordinary restraint shown by people involved in the sit-ins and other protests against discrimination that occurred throughout the nation in the years that followed. In 1963 the image of demonstrators in Birmingham, Alabama, refusing to fight back even after police attacked them with tear gas, fire hoses, clubs, and dogs was branded into the minds of TV viewers and became one of the most enduring symbols of African Americans’ struggle for freedom and equality.
Media coverage brought these events to the attention of millions of white Americans, shocking them into recognizing the huge gulf between their professed values and actual practices. In the 1960s thousands of young white and black people volunteered to take part in the Southern Regional Council's Voter Education Project (VEP) to study the causes of low voter participation among black people in the South. The nation's major civil rights organizations each received grants to conduct voter registration drives in the southern states, working closely with local groups in the region. The project aimed to increase the number of African American voters and to gather evidence of the need for federal legislation to ensure black people's democratic rights by documenting incidents of discrimination, intimidation, and violence.87
The emergence of the national civil rights movement boosted morale and inspired renewed activity among local activists in Louisiana. Martin Williams remembered that by the late 1950s, repression by the state legislature and the Citizens’ Councils had made speaking out against the system too dangerous for many people to contemplate, “but after the movement got started we had a little bit more protection, and we got a little bit more exposure through the news media, the TV media—that kind of educated a lot of people.” The knowledge that people all over the nation supported the struggle strengthened activists’ determination to continue the fight for equality, despite the risks. Williams stated, “When you get in that movement, you don't think about death. . . . Look like all that fear just leaves.”88
These developments revitalized the freedom struggle, but they came at a price. In the 1930s and 1940s cooperation between labor unions and civil rights organizations had raised the possibility of poor white and black people joining together to demand political and economic rights. Federal intervention to protect the rights of workers to organize and the passage of legislation to ensure decent working conditions greatly strengthened the position of labor, creating a chance to build a mass movement around social issues that affected all Americans, such as job security, education, housing, and health care. Anticommunism and the racist rhetoric of southern segregationists in the 1950s destroyed these hopes. African American leaders became wary of addressing the class inequalities that lay at the base of the white supremacist social order for fear of being perceived as dangerous radicals. At the same time, union organizers shied away from advocating black equality to avoid losing white workers’ support.89
When the black freedom movement captured the nation's attention in the 1960s, the economic agenda was pushed to the background. Key initiatives like the Montgomery bus boycott and the Birmingham protests had included demands for jobs, but these aspects of the struggle were overshadowed in media portrayals that preferred to emphasize more esoteric goals, like dignity or respect. National civil rights leaders at first did little to challenge the emerging consensus, which denied the need for fundamental restructuring of the social system to ensure black equality. The middle-class white and black activists who headed CORE and the students who joined the organization's Louisiana Freedom Task Force each summer tended to define racism as essentially a moral problem that could be eliminated by ending segregation, ensuring black voting rights, and encouraging interracial communication. At the local level, however, many black people continued to attach the greatest importance to removing economic obstacles to equality. It remained for them to remind a new generation of activists that civil rights were not enough.
8 To Provide Leadership and an Example:
The Congress of Racial Equality and Local People in the 1960s
In August 1962 CORE received a grant from the Voter Education Project to conduct voter registration drives in seven parishes in Louisiana's Sixth Congressional District, located in the southeastern part of the state. The organization's Louisiana Freedom Task Force was active in the region for the next four years, conducting intensive voter registration drives during the summer months as well as working with local leaders on more long-term community organizing projects. In the mid-1960s CORE expanded its reach to include eight additional parishes in the northern Fourth and Fifth Congressional Districts.1
CORE began its work in rural Louisiana with three main objectives: increasing black voter registration, desegregating public facilities, and training local people in nonviolence. Volunteers aimed to encourage people to join the civil rights movement by educating them about the importance of voting and teaching them how to challenge segregation using nonviolent direct action. As time went on, CORE workers realized that not all of the black people they worked with shared their ideas about how best to overcome white supremacy. Voter registration provided a common goal that local people as well as outside activists embraced. But attempting to desegregate restaurants or public facilities did not seem as important to some black Louisianans as gaining fair treatment by employers, increases in pay, and access to decent jobs. Despite CORE's efforts to convert them to nonviolence, many local activists continued to carry guns to defend themselves. CORE workers eventually modified their own attitudes toward both these issues. By the mid-1960s most volunteers had accepted the practice of armed self-defense, and CORE as an organization began to emphasize economic inequality as the major problem facing African Americans. In the second half of the decade, the goals of the broader freedom struggle were revived and given new impetus by federal antipoverty programs that offered the possibility of real change. As in the 1930s, however, white political and economic leaders in rural Louisiana successfully resisted these threats to their power. At the end of the 1960s and well into the late twentieth century, the most fundamental problems of many black people remained unresolved.
Founded in 1942, CORE was one of the nation's oldest civil rights organizations. Its origins and development over the next two decades reflected man
y of the broader political trends of the post–World War II era. A small group of white and black young people in Chicago who were committed to pacifism, interracialism, and economic justice initiated the formation of CORE, conceiving it as a nationwide network of activists who were prepared to engage in direct action against racism.2 Early CORE chapters concentrated mostly on attempting to desegregate restaurants and public facilities in northern cities, with a few chapters also trying to address discrimination in employment. Although CORE achieved some success against the most obvious forms of injustice, like segregation, activists found that pressuring business owners to hire more African Americans was much more difficult. Excluding black people from jobs did not violate northern civil rights statutes or offend white Americans’ sensibilities in the same way that excluding them from dining and recreational facilities did, giving CORE no clear basis (in the eyes of the larger community) for its attacks on racist employers. Like many similar organizations, CORE also sought to avoid any association with leftists and radicals, adopting a resolution at its 1948 convention that prohibited communist-controlled groups from affiliating with it. Heavily dependent on white liberals for members and financial contributions, CORE narrowed its focus to those issues most likely to gain their support. When the organization expanded into the southern states in the late 1950s, its attention centered on direct action against segregation. In the 1960s the VEP provided the resources and incentive for CORE to include voter registration among its activities in the South.3
After receiving funding for VEP work in rural Louisiana, CORE's first task was to establish contact with local civil rights leaders in the region. Ronnie Moore, one of several black college students who had been expelled from Southern University in Baton Rouge for participating in protest marches and sit-ins, assumed responsibility for initiating these efforts.4 For several months Moore worked virtually alone, surveying each parish and assessing the possibilities for civil rights work. He quickly discovered a group in Iberville Parish that was eager to cooperate with the voter registration drive and moved his headquarters to Plaquemine in October 1962. Veteran activist W. W. Harleaux recognized an opportunity to gain valuable assistance for the freedom struggle in his community. As was the case in many parishes, people wanted to participate, but they needed money for things like printing leaflets, making copies of registration application forms, and transport for canvassing and for bringing people to the registrar's office. Early in 1963 Harleaux wrote to VEP director Wiley Branton outlining the constraints that widespread poverty among African Americans in the parish placed on civil rights activity. Harleaux stated that black people in rural Louisiana needed outside help and asked Branton to allocate more resources to the region.5
Between October 1962 and May 1963 members of the Iberville Parish NAACP and the local voters’ league assisted Moore in persuading several hundred African Americans to attempt to register in Iberville and the surrounding parishes. Participants filed more than three hundred complaints of discrimination with the Department of Justice, and these resulted in an investigation of voter registration records in Pointe Coupee, St. Helena, West Feliciana, Tangipahoa, and Iberville Parishes by federal agents. Meanwhile, CORE laid plans for its first summer project. Local activist Spiver Gordon helped Moore prepare for the influx of volunteers, and in July 1963 forty new workers arrived in Plaquemine for orientation and training.6
Most of these recruits were white, northern college students in their early to mid-twenties. Many had been involved in civil rights activities in their hometowns, working through church groups and youth organizations as well as CORE chapters, and they were often deeply religious and committed to pacifism. For some participants, the decision to become involved in the movement seemed the only possible response to reports of the injustice and brutality that black people suffered in the 1950s and 1960s. Former task force worker Ronnie Sigal Bouma recalled that, for her, it was simply a matter of right and wrong. “[In] the groups that I belonged to people were just aware of the fact that there were discriminatory practices going on, and they just wanted to end them, and we really didn't get into the psychology of the whole thing,” she stated. “We were simply interested in taking a moral and an active stand to change the way that companies and society and government operated, and doing it in a nonviolent way.”7
Activists Miriam Feingold, Bill Brown, and Mike Lesser shared a similar commitment to achieving racial equality. Feingold's belief that segregation was a fundamentally evil, sick, and irrational institution inspired her to participate in CORE's Freedom Ride to desegregate interstate travel facilities in 1960. Despite being arrested and serving a jail sentence in Mississippi's notorious Parchman Penitentiary as a result of that effort, Feingold once again put herself on the front line of the struggle by offering to help with the project in Louisiana. Bill Brown had been active in the movement for several years before applying as a task force worker, as had Mike Lesser. All three of these volunteers decided to stay in Louisiana for another year after CORE's initial voter registration drive ended. Their dedication and ability to empathize with local people made them some of CORE's most effective and respected organizers.8
The summer project of 1963 established the general pattern followed by CORE for the next several years. Volunteers gathered in Plaquemine, where they learned about such matters as state and local politics, the intricacies of Louisiana's complicated registration form, how to approach people when canvassing, what to do in case of harassment by the “police,” and how to organize demonstrations. After the initial training period, participants spread out into the surrounding rural areas. CORE workers and local activists went door-to-door, explaining to people the importance of registering to vote and inviting them to attend classes where they could learn how to fill out the application forms. When prospective voters were ready to take the test, task force workers transported them to the registrar's office and observed how they were received.9 Intensive VEP work usually lasted from July through August. At the end of each summer, a few volunteers stayed on as full-time task force workers.
Although the main object of the VEP was to register as many African Americans as possible before the upcoming gubernatorial and presidential elections, volunteers also worked to train local people in nonviolence and to establish CORE-like groups to challenge racism through direct action. Encouraging awareness of and adherence to CORE's philosophy and ideals was a central goal of the organization in the early part of the decade. In 1960 one local activist in Baton Rouge who had received financial aid from CORE for his organizing efforts lost this support because he had “not really indicated much progress in forming a small, dedicated group of Satyagrahis.”10 When work began on the VEP, task force staff members were asked to report weekly on their success in developing CORE chapters as well as in voter registration. As Miriam Feingold noted during a staff meeting in December 1963, the national office considered chapter development “very imp[ortan]t.”11
Local people's responses to CORE's arrival varied. Task force volunteer John Zippert recalled, “The people who were most receptive to talk to us were small farmers, people who had some degree of independence.” Several hundred black families in St. Helena and St. Landry Parishes owned farms, and African Americans in both parishes impressed CORE workers with their readiness to become involved.12 After scouting St. Landry in December 1963, Bill Brown reported: “There is a large body of persons who can be moved for the cause of FREEDOM. . . . The Negro leaders are strong, militant and willing to work.” Sharon Burger reached a similar conclusion about St. Helena Parish, stating, “The Negro community is sincerely interested in registration; many people left work in the fields during a busy season to attend the clinics, and several spent the entire day at the registrar's office even when it became obvious that there would not be time for them to get in.” Another CORE worker noted that black people in the parish provided “very capable and competent leadership. CORE Task Force workers take advice rather than give it.”13 An analogous situatio
n existed in Madison Parish, where CORE worked with Zelma Wyche's group to revitalize voter registration efforts after the local activists won a lawsuit they had filed against registrar Mary Ward in 1954. After eight years of procrastination and obstruction by parish officials, a federal court finally issued an injunction in 1962 prohibiting discrimination against black applicants.14
Self-employed farmers and business owners like those who led voter registration efforts in St. Landry, St. Helena, and Madison Parishes were still a minority in Louisiana. A much greater number of black people labored in jobs where they were subject to economic reprisals, and many were reluctant to become involved. Field reports from the rural parishes cited “apathy and fear” as major obstacles to black registration. According to one activist, civil rights work in the West Feliciana town of Hardwood was fruitless, for it was virtually owned by the King Lumber Company and closely resembled “company towns of the early 20th century” for levels of repression and for “rock-bottom conditions.” Eighty-two percent of farmers in the parish labored as tenants or sharecroppers on plantations owned by white people, and the 1960 census listed only sixty black landowners. Miriam Feingold wrote that work in the plantation regions was “the hardest, because people have been beaten down for so many years that very few are willing to fight back. We've got to travel many miles, spend much time just talking, before we convince one Negro to go to the registrar's office.” Fear of reprisals was so pervasive that when CORE workers first approached a group of ministers in West Feliciana Parish about registering, they were asked to leave. In neighboring East Feliciana Parish, a local man told activists that they might be able to work out of a house that belonged to his mother-in-law. Ed Vickery later reported, “When he approached her about renting it to us she tore it down.”15