Civil Rights Movement Reassembles to Ask: What's Next?
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/saul-landau/civil-rights-movement-rea_b_558735.html
Saul Landau
April 30, 2010
On February 1, 1960, four black students took seats at a lunch
counter at the Greensboro, North Carolina, Woolworth's. The white
waitresses ignored them. They remained in their seats. Supervisors
told them to leave. Woolworth's in North Carolina didn't serve
colored people. The students refused to move and demanded service.
In the early Spring of 1960, I went with two other students from
Madison, Wisconsin, to Montgomery, Alabama, to try to build a civil
rights support network. We met with Reverend Ralph Abernathy in
Montgomery and established links with his church; then to Birmingham
and Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth.
As we descended the steps of his church an Alabama state policeman
met us and told us to drive to the Mississippi border without
stopping. He followed us, red light on top of his car blinking. As we
entered Mississippi, a highway patrol car met us. That cop delivered
similar orders and followed us to the Tennessee border. The white
power felt uneasy.
Within a year, thousands of black and whites, mainly students began
to participate in sit-ins. They staged pickets of Woolworth stores in
the North to support integration of lunch counters in the South. What
began as one "action" evolved into a nationwide movement. I sat in
with thousands of others at San Francisco's Palace Hotel to force
management to integrate staff, and at auto-row to insure the hiring
of black salesmen. At Lucky Supermarkets integration activists filled
shopping carts with groceries, placed them on the conveyer belt and
left the store -- to force Lucky to hire people of color at check-out counters.
On April 17, 2010, some of those sit-in organizers heard Attorney
General Eric Holder. "There is a direct line from that lunch counter
to the Oval Office," he told the 1,500 people assembled to celebrate
the 50th anniversary of SNCC (Student Non-Violent Coordinating
Committee) at Shaw University in Raleigh North Carolina. "If not for
SNCC," Holder said, "I would not be Attorney General. If not for
SNCC, Barack Obama would not be President."
SNCC became a school for organizers. Mario Savio learned from Bob
Moses at the Mississippi SNCC project and returned to Berkeley to
become the spokesman for the Free Speech Movement. David Harris went
from SNCC to non-violent anti-war protests.
A de-segregation movement aimed at public services and accommodations
evolved into a dynamic social and political force. In 1964, the
Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party challenged the Jim Crow whites
at the Democratic convention. They failed to get seated, but on March
15, 1965, following a police attack against non-violent
integrationists preparing a march to Montgomery that killed Rev.
James Reeb, a white northerner, President Lyndon Johnson proclaimed,
"We shall overcome," to push passage of the Voting Rights Bill.
By 1965, SNCC organizers had registered tens of thousands of
previously disenfranchised voters in several southern States where
they faced murderous police and Klansmen. Klan members murdered Viola
Liuzzo near Selma. Klanners and cops conspired to assassinate Michael
Schwerener and Andrew Goodman and their black comrade, James Chaney.
SNCC countered murder with courage - and reason and justice. By the
late 1960s, elected black officials, including sheriffs, had begun a
decisive change in the racial makeup of the American political system
and forced an end to southern segregation. In the late 1970s, even
Jim Crow poster boy former Alabama Governor George Wallace apologized
for his prior segregationist advocacy.
The Dixiecrats lost power over the Democratic Party. Some became
Republicans, but could no longer say the "n" word in public.
Fifty years later, a zealot spat on former SNCC organizer and now
Congressman John Lewis and called him "nigger" - for supporting
health insurance reform.
Lewis responded with dignity as he had done before when faced with
far worse challenges. He joined hundreds of SNCC veterans at Shaw
University in Raleigh, North Carolina, where the sit-in idea
originated. Raleigh's once segregated hotels, restaurants and bars
were now integrated. Blacks sat front, back and middle on city buses.
The Civil Rights Movement unified millions of Americans behind one
basic issue: getting the vote. They succeeded. What issue today could
unify such a movement?
Harry Belafonte who played an important role in getting support for
SNCC and throughout SNCC's history scolded some conference attendees
for complacency. The audience cheered him.
SNCC addressed core racial issues, but not class issues that Dr. King
had begun to tackle before his assassination. Belafonte reminded the
audience of the immense job before them. The sons and daughters of
SNCC veterans, plus young people organizing from around the country
cheered him - before returning to Atlanta, Los Angeles, Boston,
Chicago and other areas to continue the work of the 1960s' heroes.
Some spoke or listened at the meeting. Julian Bond, who served 20
years in the Georgia legislature, outlined the history of SNCC. Danny
Glover preached action in outlining the contemporary. Bernice Reagon
Johnson and the Freedom singers sang - half a century later - for
freedom. The inspirational Rev. James Lawson agreed with Belafonte.
SNCC did its parts in the 1960s, but the struggle is far from over.
.
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