Declarations of Independence: Cross-Examining American Ideology

by Howard Zinn

  They organized a citywide boycott of the buses. Black people, old and young, men and

  women, walked miles to work. One of those people, an elderly lady who walked several

  miles to and from her job, was asked if she was tired. She replied, "My feets is tired, but my soul is rested."20

  In Montgomery the struggle for rights meant not only mass meetings, car pools, and

  wearying walks. It meant going to jail. A hundred leaders of the boycott were indicted by

  the city. It meant facing daily violence and the threat of violence. Bombs exploded in four

  black churches. A shotgun blast was fired through the front door of the home of twenty-

  seven-year-old Martin Luther King, Jr., a minister and a leader of the Montgomery boycott.

  Later King's home was bombed.

  Final y, the government responded. In November 1956, a year after the boycott began, the

  Supreme Court outlawed segregation on local bus lines.21 A glimmer of what went on that

  year is conveyed in a journalist's account of one of the mass meetings in Montgomery

  during the boycott:

  More than two thousand Negroes fil ed the church from basement to balcony

  and overflowed into the street. They chanted and sang; they shouted and

  prayed; they col apsed in the aisles and they sweltered in an eighty-five

  degree heat. They pledged themselves again and again to "passive

  resistance". Under this banner they have carried on … a stubborn boycott of

  the city's buses.

  Why did four black col ege students have to sit at a "whites only" lunch counter in

  Greensboro, North Carolina, on February 1, 1960, and be arrested? Why did there have to

  be a "sit-in movement" to end discrimination in restaurants, hotels, and other public places throughout the South?22 Was it not the intent of the Thirteenth Amendment, as Justice John

  Harlan said back in 1883, to remove not only slavery but the "badges" of slavery? Was it

  not the intent of the Fourteenth Amendment to make al blacks citizens, and did not the

  Constitution (Article 4, Section 2) say that "the citizens of each State shal be entitled to al privileges and immunities of citizens in the several States"?23

  But Harlan was alone in his opinion. He was overruled by the other members of the

  Supreme Court, who said that the Fourteenth Amendment was directed at the states ("no

  state shal ") and, therefore, private persons, businesses, and corporations could

  discriminate as they like. (But did not the state enforce discrimination by arresting people who protested it? The court was silent on that.)

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  So it would take a struggle to relieve black parents of the problem of tel ing their little children that they could not sit at this lunch counter, use this water fountain, enter this building, or go to this movie theater. It would take sit-ins in city after southern city. There would be beatings and arrests. There would be in the year 1960 sit-ins and demonstrations

  in a hundred cities involving more than 50,000 people, and over 3,600 demonstrators would

  spend time in jail.

  Columnist for the Atlanta Constitution Ralph McGil was at first wary of the sit-in movement as too provocative. Later, however, he wrote in his book The South and the Southerner, "No argument in a court of law could have dramatized the immorality and irrationality of such a

  custom as did the sit-ins."24

  There was an electric effect of al this on black people around the country. Bob Moses, who

  would later become an organizer of the movement in Mississippi, told how, sitting in his

  Harlem apartment, he saw on television the pictures of the Greensboro sit-in:

  The students in that picture had a certain look on their faces, sort of sul en,

  angry, determined. Before, the Negro in the South had always looked on the

  defensive, cringing. This time they were taking the initiative. They were kids

  my age, and I knew this had something to do with my own life.25

  The young black veterans of the sit-ins from the Deep South, along with some blacks from

  the North and a few whites, formed a new organization, the Student Nonviolent

  Coordinating Committee (SNCC). They became the "point" people (to use a military term:

  those who go ahead into enemy territory) for the civil rights movement in the Deep South.

  In the spring of 1961 the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) organized the "Freedom

  Rides": whites and blacks rode together on buses throughout the South to try to break the

  segregation pattern in interstate travel. The two buses that left Washington, D.C., on May 4,

  1961, headed for New Orleans, never got there. In South Carolina, riders were beaten. In

  Alabama, a bus was set afire. Freedom Riders were attacked with fists and iron bars. The

  southern police did not interfere with any of this violence, nor did the federal government.

  FBI agents watched, took notes, did nothing.

  CORE decided to cal off the rides. SNCC, younger, more daring (more rash, some thought)

  decided to continue them. Before they started out, they cal ed the Department of Justice in

  Washington to ask for protection. A SNCC staff member, Ruby Doris Smith (one of my

  students at Spelman Col ege) told me about the phone cal : "The Justice Department said

  no, they couldn't protect anyone, but if something happened, they would investigate. You

  know how they do."

  The Kennedy administration, in touch with Governor John Patterson of Alabama, accepted

  his promise that he would protect the Riders. He broke his promise; his police did not show

  up until the Riders were beaten bloody. A black student from Nashvil e was knocked

  unconscious by a group using basebal bats. A young white man was pounded with fists and

  sticks, was left bleeding, and was given no medical attention for two hours. Ruby Doris

  Smith recal ed that SNCC organizer John Lewis (who was to go through this many times,

  and years later would be elected to Congress) was beaten, blood coming from his mouth.

  The response of the federal government was less than adequate. The Riders, despite al

  that, were going on to Jackson, Mississippi. Attorney General Robert Kennedy made a deal

  with the governor of Mississippi: Don't let the Freedom Riders get beaten; just arrest them.

  So they were arrested, busload after busload arriving in Jackson; 300 were arrested by the

  end of the summer and sent to Parchman State Penitentiary, some of them beaten, al of

  them abused. It was a feeble act by the most powerful government on earth, refusing to

  enforce its own laws, al owing mobs to do violence to citizens peaceful y riding buses,

  al owing local police to neglect their function of protecting people against assault.

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  The law was clear. Presumably, representative government had done its work by enacting the Fourteenth Amendment, which cal ed for equal protection of the law. In 1887 Congress

  had enacted the Interstate Commerce Act, which barred discrimination in interstate travel,

  and the courts had reinforced this in the 1940s and 1950s. But it took the Freedom Rides

  and the embarrassing publicity surrounding them that went around the world to get the

  federal government to do something. In November 1961, through the Interstate Commerce

  Commission, it issued specific regulations, asking that posters be put on al interstate

  terminals and establishing the right of travel without segregation.

  Even that was not seriously enforced. Two years later, in Winona, Mississippi, a group of

  blacks who used the white waiting room were arrested and brutal y beate
n. Constitutional

  government did not exist for them.

  In the smal southwest Georgia town of Albany, in the winter of 1961 and again in 1962,

  mass demonstrations took place against racial segregation. Of the 22,000 blacks in Albany,

  1,000 of them went to jail. The Southern Regional Council, a research group in Atlanta, sent

  me down to Albany to do a report on the events there.

  I found that blacks were doing no more than exercising their constitutional rights—

  marching, assembling, and speaking. Yet they were jailed and beaten—a pregnant black

  woman was kicked and lost her baby, a white civil rights worker had his jaw broken, a black

  lawyer was clubbed bloody by the local sheriff—and the U.S. government did nothing to

  interfere.26

  I knew what the Constitution said, and that was enough to make me sure President John

  Kennedy and his brother Attorney General Robert Kennedy were not abiding by their oaths

  of office. I looked up the statutes. There was a law passed after the Civil War, now in the

  books as Title 18, Section 242 of the U.S. Code, which made it a crime for any official to

  wil ful y deprive any persons of their constitutional rights. That law was not being used to

  protect blacks in the South.

  I had another opportunity to see if the federal government would enforce its own laws in

  November 1963 when I traveled to Selma, Alabama, to participate in Freedom Day. It was a

  day when black people in Dal as County were being organized to come to Selma, the county

  seat, and register to vote. It was a dangerous thing for a black person to do in Dal as

  County, and so a mass meeting was held the evening before in a black church, with

  speeches designed to build people's courage for the next day. Novelist James Baldwin came

  and so did comedian Dick Gregory, who tried to diminish fear with laughter. And there were

  the thril ing voices of the Selma Freedom Singers.

  The next day, black men and women, elderly people, and mothers carrying babies lined up

  in front of the county courthouse where the voting registrar had his office. The street was

  lined with police cars. Colonel Al Lingo's state troopers were out in force, carrying guns,

  clubs, gas masks, and electrified cattle prods. Sheriff Jim Clark had deputized a large group

  of the county's white citizens, who were there, also armed. It looked like a war.

  The federal building in Selma was across the street from the county courthouse. When two

  SNCC workers climbed up on the steps of the building and held up signs facing the

  courthouse that read Register to Vote, Sheriff Jim Clark and his deputies mounted the steps

  and dragged them off into police cars.

  That federal building also housed the local FBI. Two FBI agents were out on the street

  taking notes. Two representatives of the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division were also

  there. We were al watching the arrest of two men for standing on federal property urging

  people to register to vote, I turned to one of the Justice Department lawyers. "Don't you

  think federal law has just been violated?" I asked.

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  The Justice man said, "Yes, I suppose so."

  "Are you going to do something about that?"

  "Washington is not interested."

  [Endnote 27 position not indicated in book.]

  A few moments later, two SNCC fel ows—Chico Neblett and Avery Wil iams—tried to bring

  food and drink to people on the line who had been waiting a long time in the hot sun. They

  were intercepted by state troopers, knocked to the ground, jabbed with electric prods (I

  watched their bodies jump with each jolt), and taken off to jail. (Months later Avery Wil iams

  showed me the burns, which were stil there on his leg.)

  James Baldwin and I walked into the FBI office, whose windows looked out on the street and

  could take in the whole scene. We asked the FBI man in charge if he was going to arrest

  any of the state troopers or deputies for violating federal law. He shrugged and said he had

  no power to make an arrest.

  It was a lie. The FBI has the power to make arrests when federal law is violated before its

  eyes. Would its agents let a bank robber do his work and just watch and take notes? They

  would apprehend a bank robber, but not a local southern policeman violating a black man's

  constitutional rights. When I wrote an article for the New Republic on what happened in

  Selma, pointing to the failure of the U.S. government to enforce its own laws, Burke

  Marshal of the Justice Department replied. He defended the federal government's inaction,

  speaking mystical y of "federalism," which refers to the division of power between states and federal government. But the Fourteenth Amendment had made a clear statement about

  that division of power and gave the federal government the right to forbid the states from

  doing certain things to its citizens. And a number of laws were on the books to buttress the

  Fourteenth Amendment.

  Indeed there was a powerful statute, going way back to the Revolutionary period and then

  reinforced after the Civil War. I found this when I was puzzling over the inaction of the

  federal government. This was Title 10, Section 333 of the U.S. Code, which says,

  The President, by using the militia or the armed forces, or both or by any

  other means shal take such measures as he considers necessary to suppress,

  in a State, any … domestic violence, unlawful combination, or conspiracy, if

  it … opposes or obstructs the execution of the laws of the United States

  (emphasis added).

  There was no real need for more laws. The ones already on the books might wel be

  enough, if there were a president determined to enforce them. But the passage of new laws

  is always an opportunity for a politician to make a statement to the public that says, Look,

  I'm doing something.

  Kennedy had not planned to introduce new civil rights legislation. But in the late spring of

  1963 he put his force behind a new, sweeping civil rights law, designed to outlaw

  segregation in public accommodations, eliminate segregation in state and local facilities,

  provide for fair employment regardless of race, and also put a bit more teeth into the

  federal government's actions against discrimination in schools and in voting.

  What had changed Kennedy's mind was the mass demonstrations in Birmingham, Alabama,

  in the spring of 1963. These were organized by Martin Luther King and the Southern

  Christian Leadership Conference, along with local black leaders like Fred Shuttlesworth.

  Thousands of children marched in the streets, against firehoses and bil y clubs and police

  dogs. The photos of police brutality, of children being smashed against the wal by high-

  power hoses, of a boy being attacked by a police dog, went around the world.

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  The demonstrations spread beyond Birmingham. In the ten weeks fol owing the children's march, over 3,000 people were arrested in 758 demonstrations in 75 southern cities. By the

  end of 1963, protests had taken place in 800 cities across the country. Congress debated

  furiously the provisions of the new civil rights law, which it final y passed, after a year of

  debate and filibuster—the longest debate on any bil in history. That became the Civil Rights

  Act of 1964.28

  The same summer that the new law was being debated, events in Mississippi revealed the

 
limits of the federal government's commitment to racial equality, how little meaning there

  was to that end product of representative government, the federal statute.

  The civil rights groups working together in Mississippi—SNCC, CORE, and SCLC—decided

  that they needed help and that they should cal on young people from al over the country

  to come to Mississippi in the summer of 1964. The plan was to engage in an al -out effort to

  end segregation, to register black Mississippians to vote, to encourage local black people by

  showing how much national support they had.

  Everyone connected with the plan knew it would be dangerous. Black people in Mississippi

  faced that danger every day, al their lives. In early June 1964, on the eve of what was to

  be cal ed "The Mississippi Summer," movement organizers rented a theater near the White

  House, and a busload of black Mississippians traveled to Washington to tel a "jury" of

  prominent citizens (writers Paul Goodman, Joseph Hel er, Murray Kempton, Robert Coles,

  Sarah Lawrence President Harold Taylor, black community activist Noel Day, and others)

  about the violence they had experienced in Mississippi.

  Constitutional lawyers testified at that hearing. They pointed out that the federal

  government had sufficient legal authority—in the Constitution and in the statutes—to

  protect the civil rights workers and black Mississippians, from harm.

  The transcript of the hearing was sent to President Lyndon Johnson and to Attorney General

  Robert Kennedy, along with a request to send federal marshals to Mississippi to protect al

  those working there for civil rights. There was no response from the White House. The

  busload of Mississippians went back home.

  Twelve days after the hearing, three young people with the summer project—a black

  Mississippian named James Chaney and two whites from the North, Michael Schwerner and

  Andrew Goodman—disappeared while on a trip to Neshoba County, Mississippi, to

  investigate the burning of a black church. Chaney and Schwerner were staff members of

  CORE. Goodman was a summer volunteer and had just arrived in Mississippi hours before.

  Two days later their burned station wagon was found, but no trace of the three men. On

  August 4, forty-four days after their disappearance, their bodies were found buried on a