The African Americans

by Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

  Police told the protesters to turn back, but they knelt and prayed instead. At that moment, with the whole world watching, the sheriff took to his bullhorn and ordered police to advance, unleashing a full-on assault on peaceful, praying demonstrators. “I remember how vivid the sounds were as the troopers rushed toward us,” Lewis recalled, “the clunk of the troopers’ heavy boots, the whoops of rebel yells from the white onlookers, the clip-clop of horses’ hooves hitting the hard asphalt of the highway, the voice of a woman shouting, ‘Get ’em! Get the niggers!’”53 Television networks cut into regularly scheduled programming to broadcast the brutal incident, which became known as “Bloody Sunday.” It was the first time that this form of “We interrupt this broadcast” had been used for an unfolding news event involving black people.

  People watched Bloody Sunday, and they couldn’t look away. The deplorable images they saw spurred a remarkable number of viewers to respond. A surge of public support for the civil rights movement swept the country—and the world. Spontaneous and uncoordinated demonstrations coalesced into a national day of protest, with crowds gathering in support of the Selma marchers and voting rights everywhere, from Albuquerque to Milwaukee to Boston. But the White House was the true target.

  On March 14, exactly one week after the events in Selma, a group that grew to 15,000 held a civil rights rally in Lafayette Park, across Pennsylvania Avenue from the White House. The New York Times reported that an African American woman from Mississippi addressed the excited crowd, saying, “It’s a shame that all of us had to gather here today because of the hate in America.”54 In the days following the atrocities in Selma, protesters and picketers marched outside the fence around the White House, and there was even a sit-in inside, in the East Wing. While news of Selma and the ensuing reaction to it dominated the news for days, an embarrassed administration took aggressive steps to keep the story of the sit-in out of the news, and few people at the time knew about it.

  John Lewis at the Edmund Pettus Bridge, Selma, Alabama; March 7, 1965. Photograph. Bettmann/CORBIS, Corbis UK Ltd. SNCC leader John Lewis is shown being beaten by an Alabama state trooper during the famed Selma-to-Montgomery march in support of black voting rights.

  President Lyndon Baines Johnson, of course, knew about it. While he did not meet with the sit-in demonstrators, he openly expressed his support for protesters across the nation. “The real hero of this struggle,” he said, “is the American Negro. His actions and protests, his courage to risk safety and even to risk his life, have awakened the conscience of this nation. His demonstrations have been designed to call attention to injustice, designed to provoke change, designed to stir reform.”55 And stir reform they did. Less than six months after Selma, with the strong backing of President Johnson, Congress passed the Voting Rights Act, effectively putting an end to the discriminatory practices that kept black citizens from voting. Literacy tests, poll taxes, and harassment would no longer be permitted at the polls. The act took immediate effect, and the number of black voters increased dramatically. The results were seen in the next election cycle, as the number of black elected officials across the country grew from 300 in 1965 to 1,125 in 1969.

  James Meredith, by Marion S. Trikosko, October 1, 1962. Photograph. Library of Congress. Meredith is shown with U.S. marshals and special Justice Department agent John Doar (on Meredith’s left) on their way to integrate the University of Mississippi.

  DURING THE EARLY 1960S, THE COMPETING VIEWS ABOUT HOW BEST TO ACHIEVE RACIAL JUSTICE SEEMED roughly in balance within the African American community, with nonviolent resistance as the yin to the Black Nationalists’ yang. Now, by the middle of a wrenching decade, the prevailing sentiment among the younger generation was shifting. Indeed, the titles alone of a series of books by black authors from this period reveal the increasingly adamant politics of what would become the Black Power era: Nigger, by Dick Gregory (1964); Manchild in the Promised Land, by Claude Brown (1965); Black Power: The Politics of Liberation in America, by Stokely Carmichael and Charles V. Hamilton (1967); Soul on Ice, by Eldridge Cleaver (1968); Look Out Whitey! Black Power is Gon’ Get Your Mama!, by Julius Lester (1968); Die Nigger Die! by H. Rap Brown (1969); Seize the Time, by Bobby Seale (1970); Picking Up the Gun, by Earl Anthony (1970); Revolutionary Suicide, by Huey P. Newton (1973); and Dig the Nigger Up—Let’s Kill Him Again, by Robert E. Chinn (1976).56 Young people were tired of waiting patiently for justice, and after Bloody Sunday in 1965, it became clear that nonviolence could easily be met with brutality. The young people’s restlessness came into full view during what would be considered “the last great march of the civil rights movement”—the March Against Fear, where the concept of Black Power was first articulated for a public audience.

  In response to continuing violence at the polls after the passage of the Voting Rights Act, James Meredith (b. 1933)—known for integrating the University of Mississippi in 1962, just a few months after Charlayne Hunter and Hamilton Holmes had successfully integrated the University of Georgia—organized a personal crusade he called the March Against Fear. On June 5, 1966, he set out to walk from Memphis to Jackson, Mississippi, more than 200 miles away, accompanied by just a few other marchers. But on the second day, as he crossed the border from Tennessee into Mississippi, Meredith was shot by a white segregationist and severely wounded. Jack Thornell’s photo of Meredith’s buckshot-riddled body writhing in pain won the Pulitzer Prize for photography in 1967. While Meredith was hospitalized, Dr. King and other established civil rights leaders vowed to finish what he had started. So they began marching from Hernando, Mississippi, where Meredith was shot, to the Jackson County Courthouse, registering voters along the way.

  Despite the commitment of movement leaders to nonviolence, the marchers were joined by the Deacons for Defense, an armed group of African American men (including many veterans of the Korean War) who argued that armed “self-defense was justified” to protect against white violence. Ten days after Meredith was shot, the Deacons stood guard at a nighttime rally in Greenwood, Mississippi, as Stokely Carmichael (1941–1998), a student leader of SNCC, took the stage to speak about white resistance to black voting and about the hypocrisy of an America that allowed its citizens to fight for democracy overseas yet denied it to them at home. “Black people have to take charge,” Carmichael said. “Every courthouse in Mississippi should be burned down tomorrow…. Black citizens ought to demand Black Power…. We want Black Power!” The phrase turned into a call from Carmichael, “What do you want?” with the response from the marchers, “Black Power!” “What do you want?” “Black Power!”57

  Along the march route later, with King on his right, a reporter turned to Stokely Carmichael and asked, “Mr. Carmichael, are you as committed to the nonviolent approach as Dr. King is?” to which he replied, to Dr. King’s horror, “No, I am not. I never have [been] …”58 The rhetoric had changed from nonviolence to Black Power, and the mainstream media seized upon it. Not only was there an apparent shift in thinking within the movement, but evidence of dissension as well. The ideological splits that had characterized the African American community since the 18th century, really, had manifested themselves in public through a medium that reached almost every home in the United States. The genie was out of the bottle.

  The march persisted with opponents sharing one goal in mind, advocating different means of reaching it, yet still marching together. One thing was for sure: the foes of the movement did not distinguish their targets between the ideological camps within the movement. On June 23, local police attacked hundreds of marchers outside Canton, Mississippi, as they set up their tents for the night on the grounds of a black school. Without warning, police sprayed tear gas into the crowd, upping the abuse by pummeling the scattering people with rifle butts and jackboots. Martin Luther King and Stokely Carmichael were part of the crowd. “While our black brothers are fighting in Vietnam,” Carmichael said later, “we’re getting gassed for trying to vote in Canton, Mississippi.”59

  Stok
ely Carmichael and Martin Luther King, Jr., by Lynn Pelham, June 9, 1966. Photograph. Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images. Carmichael, to King’s left and speaking to the sheriff, King, and others assembled to complete the March Against Fear in James Meredith’s honor. Three days earlier, Meredith had been gunned down in an attempted assassination during his one-man march across Mississippi.

  When the riot was over, the field resembled a war zone. Dr. Alvin Poussaint (b. 1934), a psychiatrist and a representative of the Medical Committee for Human Rights, set up a makeshift clinic and desperately tried to attend to the wounds and trauma created by the indiscriminate violence of the police. The march ended three days later, on June 26, with a rally 15,000 strong outside the state capitol building in Jackson. There, Poussaint addressed the brutalized crowd and incited them to overthrow the vicious system of segregation. “For many years we have been singing ‘We Shall Overcome,’” Poussaint said. “A new day is here, brothers, and we should begin to think, act, and feel that ‘we shall overthrow.’ ‘We shall overthrow’ the vicious system of segregation, discrimination, and white supremacy. Deep in my heart,” he concluded, “I do believe that, nonviolently, ‘we shall overthrow.’”60 Some scholars consider the March Against Fear the last freedom march and the first Black Power march.

  Less than two years later in Memphis, the same city where the March Against Fear began, Martin Luther King, Jr., the father of the nonviolent civil rights movement, was killed by an assassin’s bullet to the neck. He stood on the second-floor balcony of the Lorraine Motel—one of the few southern hotels that provided African American travelers overnight accommodations—preparing to speak before a march that was to be staged on behalf of the city’s striking black sanitation workers. He had delivered his final, prescient address, “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop,” at the Bishop Charles J. Mason Temple in Memphis the day before. The collective mourning that followed his death at age 39 soon gave way to great anxiety and despair. Rioting swept the nation as African Americans poured into the streets to vent their frustrations in cities like Boston, Chicago, Washington, D.C., and Detroit—again.

  A generation had passed since the battle over housing and jobs at the start of World War II. But after Dr. King’s assassination, rioting returned to the Motor City. Once again, the National Guard and federal troops had to be called in to quell the unrest. Throughout the era, Detroit had been America’s canary in the coal mine when it came to race relations—a harbinger of things to come. As far as black Detroiters were concerned, there was unfinished business in the struggle for equality and justice, and an increasing frustration with the slow pace of change.

  There was unfinished business for the president, too. In the wake of the assassination, President Johnson urged Americans to “reject the blind violence that has struck Dr. King, who lived by nonviolence.”61 Exactly one week after Dr. King’s death, on April 11, Johnson signed into law the Civil Rights Act of 1968, known as the Fair Housing Act. The spontaneous outpouring of rage throughout the nation following Martin Luther King’s assassination was a sign of both the black community’s understandable frustration with the persistence of institutional racism as well as a new shared, bold assertiveness. Many African Americans mourning the standard-bearer of nonviolent resistance now voiced their support for Black Power. In retrospect, the death of Martin Luther King, Jr., would mark the death of the modern civil rights movement, if we take Brown v. Board in 1954 and the Montgomery bus boycott in 1955 as its arbitrary starting points. “Freedom now” was the catchphrase of black America. The postwar decades brought about huge changes in the lives of African Americans and unprecedented progress in the fight for equality and justice. But the era also exposed new fissures between blacks and whites, and quite profoundly, within the African American community itself.

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  1 Brenda J. Gilchrist, “Detroit’s 1943 Race Riot, 50 Years Ago Today, Still Seems Too Near,” Detroit Free Press, June 20, 1993, http://crimeindetroit.com/Documents/Detroit’s%201943%20Race%20Riot,%2050%20Years%20Ago.pdf.

  2 Stephen Tuck, We Ain’t What We Ought to Be: The Black Freedom Struggle from Emancipation to Obama (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010), 210.

  3 Michael T. Knight, “Recognizing 233 Years of Black Marines,” Marine Corps Base Camp Pendleton, Marines: The Official Website of the United States Marine Corps, February 10, 2010, http://www.pendleton.marines.mil/NewsPhotos/NewsArticleDisplay/tabid/5440/Article/95455/recognizing-233-years-of-black-marines.aspx.

  4 Charles R. Drew to Jacob Billikopf, April 15, 1944, in The Charles R. Drew Papers, Profiles in Science: National Library of Medicine, http://profiles.nlm.nih,gov/ps/retrieve/ResourceMetadata/BGBBGW.

  5 Dr. LaSalle D. Leffall, Jr., interview by Jason Gart, November 19, 2010, The Charles R. Drew Papers, Profiles in Science: National Library of Medicine, http://profiles.nlm.nih.gov/ps/retrieve/ResourceMetadata/BGBBJV.

  6 Spencie Love, One Blood: The Death and Resurrection of Charles R. Drew (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 23.

  7 Henry Louis Gates, Jr., “3 Women ‘Red Tails’ Left Out,” The Root, January 25, 2012, http://www.theroot.com/views/three-women-red-tails-left-out?page=0,0.

  8 Trevor W. Coleman, Crusader for Justice: Federal Judge Damon J. Keith (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, forthcoming).

  9 Tuck, We Ain’t What We Ought to Be, 40.

  10 “1946-7-28-ABC Lear Radio Show,” http://archive.org/details/1946RadioNews.

  11 Joanne Grant, Ella Baker: Freedom Bound (New York: Wiley, 1998), 21.

  12 Barbara Ransby, Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 142.

  13 Raymond Arsenault, Freedom Riders: 1961 and the Struggle for Racial Justice (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 35.

  14 Arsenault, Freedom Riders, 53.

  15 Eric Bentley, ed., Thirty Years of Treason: Excerpts from Hearings Before the House Committee on Un-American Activities, 1938–1968 (New York: Viking Press, 1971), 770.

  16 Paul Robeson, Here I Stand (Boston: Beacon Press, 1958), 73.

  17 Tuck, We Ain’t What We Ought to Be, 230.

  18 Walter C. Daniel, Black Journals of the United States (London: Greenwood Press, 1982), 159.

  19 John H. Johnson, Succeeding Against the Odds (New York: Warner Books, 1989), 157.

  20 Johnson, Succeeding Against the Odds, 156.

  21 Louis Cantor, Wheelin’ on Beale: How WDIA-Memphis Became the Nation’s First All-Black Radio Station and Created the Sound That Changed America (New York: Pharos Books, 1992), 173.

  22 Margaret McKee and Fred Chisenhall. Beale, Black & Blue: Life and Music on Black America’s Main Street (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1981), 93.

  23 McKee and Chisenhall, Beale, Black & Blue, 93.

  24 Louis Cantor, Wheelin’ on Beale, 1.

  25 Tuck, We Ain’t What We Ought to Be, 245–46.

  26 George Lincoln Rockwell, interview by Alex Haley, Playboy, April 1966, http://archive.org/stream/1966PlayboyInterview/MicrosoftWord-Document1#page/n0/mode/2up.

  27 Cantor, Wheelin’ on Beale, 13.

  28 Cantor, Wheelin’ on Beale, 51.

  29 Michael T. Bertrand, Race, Rock, and Elvis (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000), 170.

  30 David Levering Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois, 1919–1963: The Fight for Equality and the American Century (New York: Macmillan, 2001), 557.

  31 Paul Hendrickson, “The Ladies Before Rosa: They Too Wouldn’t Give Up Their Seats,” Washington Post, April 12, 1998, http://search.proquest.com.ezproxy.cul.columbia.edu/docview/408359650/13A371C21997411072A/1?accountid=10226.

  32 Joyce A. Hanson, Rosa Parks: A Biography (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2011), 91.

  33 “A Pivotal Moment in the Civil Rights Movement: The Murder of Emmett Till,” Facing History and Ourselves, 2013, http://www.facinghistory.org/resources/units/pivotal-moment-civil-rights-moveme.

/>   34 Cheryl F. Phibbs, The Montgomery Bus Boycott: A History and Reference Guide (Santa Barbara, CA: Greenwood, 2009), 59.

  35 Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff, The Race Beat: The Press, the Civil Rights Struggle, and the Awakening of a Nation (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006), 407.

  36 Ransby, Ella Baker, 147–48.

  37 John Lewis, interview by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., October 25, 2012.

  38 Henry Hampton and Steve Fayer, Voices of Freedom: An Oral History of the Civil Rights Movement from the 1950s Through the 1980s (New York: Bantam, 1991), 53.

  39 Ransby, Ella Baker, 244.

  40 Ransby, Ella Baker, 246.

  41 Andrew B. Lewis, The Shadows of Youth: The Remarkable Journey of the Civil Rights Generation (New York: Hill and Wang, 2009), 49–50.

  42 Malcolm X, interview by Mike Wallace, The Hate That Hate Produced, News Beat, WNTA-TV (CBS), July 13–17, 1959. Interview footage is available at http://archive.org/details/PBSTheHateThatHateProduced.

  43 “Outgrowing the Ghetto Mind,” Ebony 18, no. 10 (August 1963): 98.

  44 Peniel E. Joseph, Waiting ’Til the Midnight Hour: A Narrative History of Black Power in America (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 2006), 84.

  45 Joseph, Waiting ’Til the Midnight Hour, 82.

  46 Joseph, Waiting ’Til the Midnight Hour, 83.

  47 Joseph, Waiting ’Til the Midnight Hour, 55.

  48 “We Want Freedom Now, King Tells Negro Rally: 125,000 Take Part in Massive Detroit Demonstration Marking Riot Anniversary,” Los Angeles Times, June 24, 1963.

  49 Craig Hansen Werner, A Change Is Gonna Come: Music, Race, and the Soul of America (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006), 27.