by Howard Zinn
David Walker was found dead near the doorway of the shop where he sold old clothes. The
cause of death was not clear.
From the 1830s to the Civil War, antislavery people built a movement. It took ferocious
dedication and courage. White abolitionist Wil iam Lloyd Garrison, writing in The Liberator,
breathed fire: "I accuse the land of my nativity of insulting the majesty of Heaven with the
greatest mockery that was ever exhibited to man." A white mob dragged him through the
streets of Boston in chains, and he barely escaped with his life.
The Liberator started with twenty-five subscribers, most of them black. By the 1850s, it was read by more than 100,000. The movement had become a force.
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Black abolitionists were central to the antislavery movement. Even before Garrison published The Liberator, a black periodical, Freedom's Journal, had appeared. Later, Frederick Douglass, ex-slave and abolitionist orator, started his own newspaper, North Star.
A conference of blacks in 1854 declared "it is emphatical y our battle; no one else can fight
it for us."
The Underground Railroad brought tens of thousands of slaves to freedom in the United
States and Canada. Harriet Tubman, born into slavery, had escaped alone as a young
woman. She then made nineteen dangerous trips back into the South, bringing over 300
slaves to freedom. She carried a pistol and told the fugitives, "You'l be free or die."
When the Fugitive Slave Act was passed by Congress in 1850, blacks, joined by white
friends, took the lead in defying the law, in harboring escaped slaves, in rescuing captured
slaves from courtrooms and police stations. After the act was passed, Reverend J. W.
Loguen, who had escaped from slavery on his master's horse, had gone to col ege, and had
become a minister in Syracuse, New York, spoke to a meeting in that city:
The time has come to change the tones of submission into tones of defiance—
and to tel Mr. Fil more (President Mil ard Fil more, who signed the law) and
Mr. Webster (Senator Daniel Webster of Massachusetts, who supported the
law), if they propose to execute this measure upon us, to send on their
bloodhounds … . I received my freedom from Heaven, and with it came the
command to defend my title to it … . I don't respect this law—I don't fear it—I
won't obey it! It outlaws me, and I outlaw it … . I wil not live a slave, and if
force is employed to re-enslave me, I shal make preparations to meet the
crisis as becomes a man.10
No more shameful record of the moral failure of representative government exists than the
fact that Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Act, the president signed it, and the Supreme
Court approved it.11
The act forced captured blacks to prove they were not someone's slave; an owner claiming
him or her needed only an affidavit from friendly whites. For instance, a black man in
southern Indiana was taken by federal agents from his wife and children and returned to an
owner who claimed he had run away nineteen years ago. Under the act more than 300
people were returned to slavery in the 1850s.
The response to it was civil disobedience. "Vigilance committees" sprang up in various cities to protect blacks endangered by the law. In 1851 a black waiter named Shadrach, who had
escaped from Virginia, was serving coffee to federal agents in a Boston coffeehouse. They
seized him and rushed him to the federal courthouse. A group of black men broke into the
courtroom, took Shadrach from the federal marshals, and saw to it that he escaped to
Canada. Senator Webster denounced the rescue as treason, and the president ordered
prosecution of those who had helped Shadrach escape. Four blacks and four whites were
indicted and put on trial, but juries refused to convict them.12
Federal agents were sent to Boston right after the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law to
apprehend Wil iam and El en Craft, who were famous escapees from slavery. They had
disguised themselves as master and servant (she was light skinned and dressed as a man)
and had taken the railroad north. Boston was ful of defiance. White abolitionist minister
Theodore Parker hid El en Craft in his house and kept a loaded revolver on his desk. A black
abolitionist concealed Wil iam Craft. He stacked two kegs of gunpowder on his front porch.
The local vigilance committee warned the federal marshals it was not safe to remain in
Boston, and they left town.
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In Christiana, Pennsylvania, in September 1851, a slave-owner arrived from Maryland with federal agents, to capture two of his slaves. There was a shoot-out with two dozen armed
black men determined to protect the fugitives, and the slave-owner was shot dead.
President Fil more cal ed out the marines and assembled federal marshals to make arrests.
Thirty-six blacks and five whites were put on trial. A jury acquitted the first defendant, a
white Quaker, and the government decided to drop the charges against the others.
Rescues took place and juries refused to convict. In Oberlin, Ohio, a group of students and
one of their professors organized the rescue of an escaped slave; they were not prosecuted.
A white man in Springfield, Massachusetts, had organized blacks into a defense group in
1850. His name was John Brown. In 1858, John Brown and his band of white and black men
made a wild, daring effort to capture the federal arsenal at Harper's Ferry, Virginia, and set
off a slave revolt throughout the South. Brown and his men were hanged by the
col aboration of the state of Virginia and the national government. He became a symbol of
moral outrage against slavery. The great writer Ralph Waldo Emerson, not an activist
himself, said of John Brown's execution: "He wil make the gal ows holy as the cross."
What Garrison had said was necessary—"a most tremendous excitement" was shaking the
country. The abolitionist movement, once a despised few, began to be listened to by
mil ions of Americans, indignant over the enslavement of 4 mil ion men, women, and
children.
Nevertheless when the Civil War began, Congress made its position clear, in a resolution
passed with only a few dissenting votes: "This war is not waged … for any purpose of …
overthrowing or interfering with the rights of established institutions of those states, but …
to preserve the Union."
As for President Lincoln, his caution, his politicking around the issue of slavery (despite his
personal indignation at its cruelty) had been made clear when he campaigned for the
Senate in 1858. At that time he told voters in Chicago: "Let us discard al this quibbling
about… this race and that race and the other race being inferior, and therefore they must be
placed in an inferior position."
But two months later, in southern Il inois, he assured his listeners: "I wil say, then, that I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political
equality of the white and black races … . I as much as any other man am in favor of having
the superior position assigned to the white race."13
The abolitionists went to work. To their acts of civil disobedience and of armed resistance,
they added more orthodox methods of agitation and education. Petitions for emancipation
poured into Congress in 1861 and 1862. Congress, responding, passed a Confiscation Act,
providing for the freeing of slaves of an
yone who fought with the Confederacy. But it was
not enforced.
When the Emancipation Proclamation was issued at the start of 1863, it had little practical
effect. It only declared slaves free in states stil rebel ing against the Union. Lincoln used it
as a threat to Confederate states: if you keep fighting, I wil declare your slaves free; if you
stop fighting, your slaves wil remain. So, slavery in the border states, on the Union side,
were left untouched by the proclamation. The London Spectator remarked dryly, "The
principle is not that a human being cannot justly own another, but that he cannot own him
unless he is loyal to the United States."14 Stil , the moral impact of the proclamation was
strong. It came from Lincoln's military needs, but also from the pressures of the antislavery
movement.
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By the summer of 1864 approximately 400,000 signatures asking legislation to end slavery had been gathered and sent to Congress. The First Amendment's right "to petition the
government for a redress of grievances" had never been used so powerful y. In January
1865 the House of Representatives, fol owing the lead of the Senate, passed the Thirteenth
Amendment, declaring slavery unconstitutional.
The representative system of government, the constitutional structure of the modern
democratic state, unresponsive for eighty years to the moral issue of mass enslavement,
had now final y responded. It had taken thirty years of antislavery agitation and four years
of bloody war. It had required a long struggle—in the streets, in the countryside, and on the
battlefield. Frederick Douglass made the point in a speech in 1857:
Let me give you a word of the philosophy of reforms. The whole history of the
progress of human liberty shows that al concessions yet made to her august
claims have been born of struggle … . If there is no struggle there is no
progress. Those who profess to favor freedom and yet deprecate agitation,
are men who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain
without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of
its many waters. The struggle may be a moral one; or it may be a physical
one; or it may be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle. Power
concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never wil .
A hundred years after the Civil War, Frederick Douglass's statement was stil true. Blacks
were being beaten, murdered, abused, humiliated, and segregated from the cradle to the
grave and the regular organs of democratic representative government were silent
col aborators.
The Fourteenth Amendment, born in 1868 of the Civil War struggles, declared "equal
protection of the laws." But this was soon dead—interpreted into nothingness by the
Supreme Court, unenforced by presidents for a century.
Even the most liberal of presidents, Franklin D. Roosevelt, would not ask Congress to pass a
law making lynching a crime. Roosevelt, through World War II, maintained racial
segregation in the armed forces and was only induced to set up a commission on fair
employment for blacks when black union leader A. Philip Randolph threatened a march on
Washington. President Harry Truman ended segregation in the armed forces only after he
was faced with the prospect—again it was by the determined A. Philip Randolph—of black
resistance to the draft.
The Fifteenth Amendment, granting the right to vote, was nul ified by the southern states,
using discriminatory literacy tests, economic intimidation, and violence to keep blacks from
even registering to vote. From the time it was passed in 1870 until 1965, no president, no
Congress, and no Supreme Court did anything serious to enforce the Fifteenth Amendment,
although the Constitution says that the president "shal take care that the laws be faithful y executed" and also that the Constitution "shal be the Supreme Law of the land."
If racial segregation was going to come to an end, if the century of humiliation that fol owed
two centuries of slavery was going to come to an end, black people would have to do it
themselves, in the face of the silence of the federal government. And so they did, in that
great campaign cal ed the civil rights movement, which can roughly be dated from the
Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955 to the riot in Watts, Los Angeles, in 1965, but its roots go
back to the turn of the century and it has branches extending forward to the great urban
riots of 1967 and 1968.
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I speak of roots and branches, because the movement did not suddenly come out of
nowhere in the 1950s and 1960s. It was prepared by many decades of action, risk, and
sacrifice; by many defeats; and by a few victories. The roots go back at least to the turn of
the century, to the protests of Wil iam Monroe Trotter; to the writings of W. E. B. DuBois; to
the founding of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP); to
the streetcar boycotts before World War I; to the seeds sown in black churches, in black
col eges, and in the Highlander Folk School of Tennessee; and to the pioneering work of
radicals, pacifists, and labor leaders.15
It is a comfort to the liberal system of representative government to say the civil rights
movement started with the Supreme Court decision of 1954 in Brown v. Board of Education
of Topeka. That was when the Supreme Court final y concluded that the Fourteenth
Amendment provision of "equal protection of the laws" meant that public schools had to
admit anyone, regardless of color. But to see the origins of the movement in that decision
gives the Supreme Court too much credit, as if it suddenly had a moral insight or a spiritual
conversion and then read the Fourteenth Amendment afresh.
The amendment was no different in 1954 than it had been in 1896, when the Court made
racial segregation legal. There was just a new context now, a new world. And there were
new pressures. The Supreme Court did not by itself reintroduce the question of segregation
in the public schools. The question came before it because black people in the South went
through years of struggle, risking their lives to bring the issue into the courts.
Local chapters in the South of the NAACP had much to do with the suits for school
desegregation. The NAACP itself can be traced back to an angry protest in Boston in 1904 of
the black journalist Wil iam Monroe Trotter against Booker T. Washington. Washington, a
black educator, founder of Tuskegee Institute, favored peaceful accommodation to
segregation. Trotter's arrest and his sentence of thirty days in prison aroused that
extraordinary black intel ectual W. E. B. DuBois, who wrote later, "when Trotter went to jail, my indignation overflowed … . I sent out from Atlanta … a cal to a few selected persons for
organized determination and aggressive action on the part of men who believe in Negro
freedom and growth."16 That "cal to a few persons" started the Niagara Movement—a
meeting in Niagara, New York, in 1905 that led to the founding of the NAACP in 1911.
Many years later, with the legal help of the NAACP, the Reverend Joseph DeLaine ral ied the
black community in Clarendon County, South Carolina, to bring suit in the Brown case.
Because of this, Reverend DeLaine was fired from his teaching job. So were his wife, two of
his sisters, and a
niece. He was denied credit from any bank. His home was set ablaze,
while the fire department stood by and watched. When gunmen fired at his house in the
night, he fired back, and then, charged with felonious assault, he had to flee the state. His
church was burned to the ground, and he was considered a fugitive from justice.17
It seems a common occurrence that a hostile system is made to give ground by a
combination of popular struggle and practicality. It had happened with emancipation in the
Civil War. In the case of school desegregation, the persistence of blacks and the risks they
took became joined to a practical need of the government. The Brown decision was made at
the height of the cold war, when the United States was vying with the Soviet Union for
influence and control in the Third World, which was mostly nonwhite.
Attorney General Herbert Brownel , arguing before the Supreme Court, asked that the
"separate but equal" doctrine, which al owed segregation in the public schools, "be stricken down," because "it furnishes grist for the communist propaganda mil s, and it raises doubt, even among friendly nations, as to the intensity of our devotion to the democratic faith."18
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In outlawing school segregation, the Supreme Court declared that integration should proceed "with al deliberate speed," and indeed, the executive branch was very deliberate in enforcing the decision. Eleven years later, by 1965, over three-fourths of the school districts
in the South remained segregated. It was not until the urban riots of 1965, 1967, and 1968
that the Supreme Court final y said the "al deliberate speed" injunction was no longer
"constitutional y permissible" and then desegregation of schools in the Deep South began to speed up.19
By the provision of the Fourteenth Amendment for equal protection, there should have been
no segregation of the buses in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1955. If the amendment had
meaning, Rosa Parks should not have been ordered out of her seat to give it to a white
person; she should not have been arrested when she refused. But the federal government
was not enforcing the Constitution. The checks and balances were checkmated and out of
equilibrium, and the black population of Montgomery had to get rid of bus segregation by
their own efforts.
