Notes on African-American History Since 1900

Integration of the University of Alabama by Autherine J. Lucy. Supreme Court rules Montgomery’s (Alabama) laws, Separate but Equal, on public transportation is unconstitutional.

-Formed by Martin Luther King (elected president)

-Meets with 60 ministers from across the south.

-Advocates nonviolent direct action as a strategy for achieving equality.

-Starts non-violent movement to the end of Jim Crow and gain voting rights in South.

-Jim Crow is ruled unconstitutional.

Different groups experiment with nonviolent direct action. The Louisville NAACP tries sit-ins to desegregate public facilities. Charleston, West Virginia and Lexington CORE try sit-ins.

Slater King runs for Mayor of Albany, Georgia and Robert F. Williams runs for Mayor of Monroe, North Carolina. Both run as independents.

Baker consequently exhorted the leadership of the Montgomery Improvement Association to continue its fight against widespread racial injustice, not for just the desegregation of buses. Through Baker’s efforts, in 1957 the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) was formed to fight all types of racial injustice.²¹⁹

“Spread the leadership roles so you’re organizing people to be self-sufficient rather than to be dependent upon...a charismatic leader.”²²⁰

Ella Baker always believed in the concept of mobilizing the grassroots, therefore, she would participate in workshops and projects.

Ella Baker often said, "Hitting an individual with your fists is not enough to overcome racism and segregation. It takes organization, it takes dedication, it takes the willingness to stand and do what has to be done when it has to be done."

Ella Baker taught that participatory democracy had three themes:

1. 
   the involvement of grassroots people in the decisions that affect their lives;
   
2. 
   the minimization of hierarchy and professionalism in organizations working for social change; and
   
3. 
   engagement of direct action to resolve social problems.²²²
   

Baker taught how to work with the local leadership in a community by first assisting their activities before proceeding in a different direction. Baker constantly repeated that the common working masses had the power to change the system, once they saw their power and were determined to use it. Baker said,

Their audacity, their non-violent defiance marked a turning point on black American history. Their militant action marked a qualitative change, not only among black people, but also within the general class struggle. Within a few months, thousands of black students and folk from the towns and rural areas were to joint he numerous sit-in demonstrations at drug stores and national chair store lunch counters throughout the South.²²⁸

On February 3^rd, over 50 African-Americans and three white students participated in the demonstration. Demonstrations spread to Nashville, Tennessee, Charleston, South Carolina and Atlanta, Georgia. By February 11, the protests were already expanding their base of popular support when High Point, North Carolina, high school students sat-in. On the 12^th, Rock Hill, South Carolina became the first sit-in city in a Deep South state. By the end of February, sit-ins had occurred in 30 cities in seven states (including, deep south Alabama and South Carolina) and the action focus had broadened with a sit-in at a library in Petersburg, Virginia.²³⁰

Within six months after the sit-ins started, 28 cities had integrated their lunch counters; by the fall of 1960 the number had risen to almost 100, with protest movements active in at least 60 more.²³²

...It is only when the subordinate group sees itself as being deprived (which implies a standard of comparison, a group relative to which the deprivation exists, or is perceived) that the type of situation arises in which a solution becomes desired.²³⁶

This caused tensions in the organization between those who thought of themselves as organizing a faceless mass and those who thought you ought to let the faceless mass decide what to do.²⁴²

On October 14-16^th the second conference of SNCC took place in Atlanta, Georgia. There were present ninety-five voting delegates, plus SNCC staff, which voted, plus thirteen alternates. There were probably about a dozen whites out of the ninety-five delegates and there were ninety-eight registered observers, twelve of whom represented eleven different groups or publications.

At a SNCC meeting in early February, the fifteen students present unanimously decided to support the Rock Hill protesters. Four black activists volunteered to travel to Rock Hill and join those in a jail. The four volunteers were Diane Nash, Charles Jones of John C. Smith University in Charlotte, NC, Ruby Doris Smith of Spelman College in Atlanta, and Charles Sherrod of Virginia Union in Richmond Virginia.²⁴⁶

The SNCC activists advocated “Jail, No Bail.”
The SNCC contingent arrived in Rock Hill, was arrested and convicted for attempting to obtain service at a lunch counter and joined the group already imprisoned. There were some efforts at a jail instead of bail movement on Southern campuses, and at one point there were in various towns as many as 100 students serving sentences instead of appealing.
Although the jailed activists hoped that many others would join them in Rock Hill, few students were willing to leave school for extended jail terms. After a month in jail, the activists were forced to concede they had not achieved their objective. Despite the collapse of the Rock Hill jail-in movement, the decision of the four SNCC representatives to participate demonstrated the willingness of activists associated with SNCC to become involved whenever a confrontation with segregationists forces developed.²⁴⁷
Meanwhile student protest spread from Greensboro to San Antonio. A national campaign was organized and store chains that were boycotted in the South were picketed in the North. African-Americans controlled 10 million dollars of business in downtown Nashville alone. The local African-American community leaders and the students organized a boycott for all of the downtown area and also a picket line. After the home of Z. Alexander Lube, defense lawyer of the incarcerated students, was bombed, students came from campuses all around to form the first major march of the civil rights movement in Nashville. Mayor Ben West was asked whether he believed if it was morally permissible for a man or a woman to be discriminated on the basis of their color or race, and he responded, “no”. Three weeks later, African-American customers were served at a lunch counter in downtown Nashville. African-American students had established themselves as a force to be reckoned with in the civil rights movement.
By April 1960, 50,000 African-American and white students had joined the sit-in movement.