The Walls of Segregation Come Tumbling Down

Brown v. Board of Education was actually an amalgamation of several cases challenging the separate but equal doctrine laid down by Plessy in 1890.

The decision that led to the landmark case was Briggs v. Elliott, a case that originated in Clarendon County, South Carolina. That case was launched in 1950, and involved school principal and AME minister Rev. Joseph Armstrong DeLaine of Liberty AME Church.

Located southeast of Columbia, South Carolina's capital, Clarendon County is filled with rolling fields and woodland. In the late 1940's, the population of the county was 70% black. Under the "separate-but-equal" education system, the school board spent $179 on each white child and $46 on each black child. As a result, there were vast discrepancies in the educational facilities for the two groups. In the black schools, there were very few seats, and the state provided no bricks and mortar whatsoever. In many instances, parents had to go to lumber mills to get handouts - lumber that was so badly warped that they couldn't sell it. The parents used this lumber to build schoolhouses. In other cases, churches or Masonic lodges became schools. In addition, black children often had to walk, while white children of the same district were given buses. Rev. DeLaine's request of a bus for his pupils, who walked seven miles daily, was the action that prompted Briggs v. Elliott.

The case began without any thought of integration. Rather, the intent was to make the state of South Carolina provide equal educational opportunity for black children. But when the plaintiffs, led by NAACP Legal Defense Fund lawyer Thurgood Marshall, went before the district courts in Charleston, Judge J. Waites Waring responded by saying, "You are wasting my time - you've got the laws on the book which give you separate but equal, but as long as you have separate, you never will have equality. So go back and amend your case and come back and challenge segregation itself."

On Judge Waring's advice, Thurgood Marshall changed tactics. Briggs v. Elliott was heard by a panel of three federal judges in Charleston, South Carolina, who ruled against them; however, Judge Waring's s' dissent formed the legal foundation for the Supreme Court in the Brown decision.

By this time, however, Rev. DeLaine had been forced to leave South Carolina. His home burned to the ground while local firefighters stood by, claiming the fire lay outside their jurisdiction. He received frequent death threats, and when the AME church reassigned him to neighboring Florence County, his troubles escalated.

DeLaine received a letter telling him if he did not leave South Carolina, he and his family would burn to death in their home. Night-riders fired shots at the DeLaine home. DeLaine fired back - but only, he said, to mark the vehicle the assailants were using.

Nevertheless he was charged with attempted murder. He fled to New York, where he died in 1974.

But Rev. DeLaine maintained faith that his actions had been for the good of his people. In the year 2000, some 45 years later and 25 years after he died, the charges levied against him were finally vacated.

Read more about this case at http://www.unbrokencircle.org/scripts03.htm

Creating A Multiracial Christian Coalition

The Civil Rights Movement became a powerful Christian-led movement during the mid-twentieth century. It united black and white, north and south, and disparate elements of churches that had been sundered since before the Civil War. It brought together Jews and gentiles, as the descendents of the people that Moses led joined the struggle of those who had adopted the Biblical Book of Exodus as a metaphor for their long sojourn in America.

But this coalition did not spring up over night.

Mainstream black churches, afraid of disrupting longstanding relationships with whites in their communities, were slow to get involved. Martin Luther King himself was ejected from his position as vice president of the black National Baptist Convention for his "radical" views. He soon found himself lobbying on two racial fronts.

He reminded black ministers that they could not preach the glories of heaven while ignoring conditions that cause men an earthly hell. Few congregations could hear him speak without being swayed to his cause.

His task with white ministers, however, proved more difficult.

During the Montgomery Bus Boycott, King expected support from white churches and their ministers. These ministers were largely seminary graduates, seemingly "exposed" to the New Testament gospel - or so King thought.

But only Robert Graetz, the minister of a black Lutheran congregation in Montgomery, publicly supported the boycott. The others accused King of mixing religion and politics. He responded with a strategy of education and persuasion. If racism was caused by ignorance, education would prove crucial in removing it. He cited three arguments for broad Christian embrace of desegregation. First, it was inherently unequal. Secondly, it "scars the soul" of both the segregator and the segregated. And third, "it ends up depersonalizing the segregated." He used Biblical explication and social science research to back up each argument.

He lobbied, uselessly, for five years in the South. Meanwhile, northern congregations responded to his call. During the Albany Movement, northern ministers and congregations flooded south. Several theologians and church leaders participated in the freedom rides. Still, southern clergymen opposed the movement and called for the restoration of law and order. In 1961, in Birmingham, a council of white ministers, including bishops in the Catholic, Episcopal, and Methodist churches, a Jewish rabbi, and a Baptist pastor, labeled King "an outsider and an extremist."

His response was "Letter from Birmingham City Jail," a letter which evoked the memory of the Apostle Paul. [You can read the letter at http://www.nobelprizes.com/nobel/peace/MLK-jail.html.] The letter was published and distributed nationally. Soon after, the National Council of Churches urged the 31 denominations that were its members to support nationwide demonstrations against discrimination. By the time of the 1965 March from Selma to Montgomery, the civil rights movement had become a true Christian coalition - but by then the seeds of righteous anger, impatience, and the pointed critique of the black Muslim leader Malcolm X had begun to have their effect.

From The Efforts of Many: The Civil Rights Movement

By 1965, a variety of organizations, all claiming faith in the idea of justice and equality, had arisen. They held differing philosophies and offered different methods for getting the job done. Some of the most important of these organizations included the following:

NATIONAL ASSOCIATION FOR THE ADVANCEMENT OF COLORED PEOPLE (NAACP)
Roy Wilkins, Executive Director
The NAACP, the oldest civil rights organization in the United States, was also seen as the most conservative as the movement entered the sixties. It was founded on February 12, 1909 by a multiracial group of activists who answered "The Call" to renew the struggle for civil and political liberty. The NAACP encouraged the participation of people of all races, nationalities and religious denominations. It struck the blow that won the battle for desegregation in 1954 when it won the Brown v. Board of Education case in the Supreme Court.

SOUTHERN CHRISTIAN LEADERSHIP CONFERENCE (SCLC)
Martin Luther King, Jr., President
SCLC advocated non-violent resistance as a means of reaching integration. It was founded on the New Testament teachings of turning the other cheek and the redemptive power of suffering. By 1965, however, its strategies were increasingly questioned as the focus of the movement moved from desegregation to economic justice.

NATIONAL URBAN LEAGUE
Whitney M. Young, Jr., Executive Director
The National Urban League was created out of a direct reaction to the Great Migration. Blacks who migrated north soon discovered that it did not fulfill its promises of opportunity and equality. The fledgling organization counseled black migrants from the South, helped train black social workers, and worked in various other ways to increase educational and employment opportunities. Ruth Standish, the widow of a railroad magnate, and African-American social worker Dr. George Edmund Haynes, a graduate of Fisk University, Yale University, and Columbia University founded the League.

Whitney M. Young, Jr., became executive director in 1961, and the Civil Rights movement prompted changes for the organization. Although the League's tax-exempt status barred it from protest activities, its New York headquarters hosted the planning meetings of A. Philip Randolph, Martin Luther King, Jr., and other civil rights leaders for the 1963 March on Washington.

STUDENT NONVIOLENT COORDINATING COMMITTEE (SNCC)
John Lewis, Chairman
The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee spearheaded the most important civil rights advances in the South. This diverse movement led by following the local consensus in the communities it had organized.

Congress of Racial Equality (CORE)
James Farmer, President
CORE was founded in 1942 by a group of students in Chicago. CORE desegregated Washington restaurants during WWII with the slogan, "Hitler's Way or the American Way?" Its members were pacifists who had been deeply influenced by the teachings of Mahatma Gandhi and the nonviolent civil disobedience campaign that he used successfully against British rule in India. CORE students were convinced that Gandhi's methods could be used to obtain civil rights in America.

ORGANIZATION OF AFRO-AMERICAN UNITY
Malik El-Shabazz, President
After Malcolm X broke from the Nation of Islam in March of 1964, he changed his name and adopted orthodox Islam as his religion, and committed his new organization to establishing alliances with liberal and left-leaning whites. He was assassinated, however, before the new group could make an impact.

The Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 fulfilled the promises of equal protection first passed during Reconstruction. They reversed a century of southern white domination over African-Americans. Although it would take another two decades to end segregation, the major goals of the civil rights coalition had been achieved.

A Faith Forged in Albany

From October to December of 1961, Albany, GA tested the strategy and the faith of civil rights organizations. It ended with the movement's first real failure - and the beginning of a new coherence.

Three organizations worked towards the desegregation of bus stations. The NAACP wanted to force the desegregation of bus stations through the courts. CORE instead worked to force the issue by bringing "Freedom Riders" from the North into Georgia. Meanwhile, SNCC volunteers, with money from Dr. King's Southern Christian Leadership Conference, bodily took over the bus station in Albany, determined to accomplish the same thing through mass demonstration.

The NAACP had to spend its scarce resources bailing people out of jail. Ultimately, they forced SNCC members to choose membership in one organization or the other. Since the NAACP and SNCC had different means to their ends, an umbrella group - the Albany Movement, a coalition of black civic improvement organizations - formed to organize mass marches and boycotts against segregation. The Albany protests demonstrated not only SNCC's appeal, but also the importance of Afro-American religious beliefs and institutions in the freedom struggle.

Over one thousand mostly young people, including Martin Luther King, Jr. were arrested. They were arrested in such numbers that soon the adults joined them, and the call for desegregated bus terminals grew into a call for a desegregated city.

The movement had relied on media images of police brutalizing protestors to sway public opinion; however, in Albany, their task was complicated by the city's chief of police, Laurie Pritchett, who responded instead by arresting demonstrators nonviolently. Instead of dramatic news footage of demonstrators being hauled away by vicious rednecks, Albany's police peacefully arrested demonstrators charged with breaking the law. Pritchett succeeded not only in keeping the peace, but also in defeating the movement there. Six years later, Albany was still segregated, and voter registration remained an elusive goal for blacks.

Rev. Prathia Hall participated in many mass meetings held at Albany's churches, and she describes her moving experience as follows:

"I was profoundly impacted by the Albany movement and the southwest Georgia project conducted by SNCC. It was my first experience of the deep South…the very first night, there was a mass meeting. The mass meeting itself was just pure power…you could hear the rhythm of the feet, and the clapping of the hands from the old prayer meeting tradition…people singing the old prayer songs…there was something about hearing those songs, and hearing that singing in Albany in the midst of a struggle for life against death, that was just the most powerful thing I'd ever experienced."

The Albany movement proved the success of certain strategies, but also highlighted the limitations of nonviolent action. Clayborne Carson, in his book, SNCC and the Black Awakening of the 1960s, quotes Charles Sherrod's observation that nonviolence remained "an invincible instrument of war". The only question was whether nonviolent activists were willing to continue to suffer.

"Till Justice Rains Down Like Water"

The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee's rise and fall coincided with the evolution of the black struggles of the 1960s. SNCC initially drew inspiration and ideas from the American tradition of religious radicalism. SNCC workers epitomized the militant mood of black people, particularly those in the most racially repressive regions of the Black Belt. SNCC "freedom fighters" acquired a singular mystique, based on their rebelliousness and their commitment to humanistic ideals.

On February 1, 1960, a group of black college students from North Carolina A&T University refused to leave a Woolworth's lunch counter in Greensboro, NC, where they had been denied service. This was the beginning of a wave of lunch counter sit-ins in college towns across the South. SNCC (pronounced "snick") was born out of this action. SNCC was thought of as the injection of "young blood" the movement needed. The NAACP favored trial cases, and SCLC moved slowly because of the many ministerial denominations in the coalition. SNCC members, on the other hand, held faith in the power of the grassroots movement to effect social change.

Over the next decade, SNCC members rode buses through the deep southern states where discrimination and segregation were most prominent. These so-called "Freedom Riders" were met at times by violent mobs that beat and injured many. However, the Freedom Riders refused to be deterred and their courageous actions brought media attention to the plight of black Americans in the Deep South. SNCC spearheaded right-to-vote campaigns as a critical move towards racial equality in the South.

In the fall of1963, they organized the Freedom Ballot in the state of Mississippi, where racial oppression was particularly severe. Joined by blacks and whites from the North, ministers and members went door-to-door in Mississippi, convincing black residents that they could control political power if they could only find the courage to vote. They succeeded - 80,000 black ballots were cast in the elections of 1964. Nevertheless, at the National Democratic Convention, Mississippi blacks were barred from seats as delegates. That action led to a bitterness and righteous anger that would play into the hands of those opposed to nonviolent strategies.

Malcolm and Martin in America

At the same time that Martin Luther King was using the gospel of social justice to create a Christian coalition, a dynamic and charismatic minister in the North was using that same gospel to condemn what he called "the hypocrisy of Christianity." Malcolm X's efforts led to an explosion of membership in the Nation of Islam, and ultimately cracked the Christian consensus within the African-American community.

Malcolm advocated black unity instead of church community, self-defense instead of nonviolence, and self-love in lieu of turning the other cheek.

"The Christian world usually is what we call the Western world," he said to one Chicago audience. "The exploitation, colonization of the dark nations or… lands was done by nations that today are known as Christian powers. Christians made slaves here in America out of twenty million black people who today are called second-class citizens… The people in Africa…today…are trying to get free from countries who represented themselves to the Africans as Christian nations. Wherever you find dark people or non-white people today…trying to get freedom, they are trying to get freedom from the people who represent themselves as Christians; and if you go to them and ask them their picture of a Christian, they'll tell you 'an exploiter, a slave master.' In America the definition would be one who promises you equal rights for a hundred years and never gives it to you."

Malcolm used this critique to draw Christians away from their churches and into the temples of the Nation of Islam; but its ramifications went far beyond Nation Of Islam membership. Malcolm's rejection of Christianity was conditioned by the religion as he experienced it and by the contradiction between what whites taught about Christianity and the role it played in the oppression of black people. He said he thought it was disgraceful for women to be dragged into paddy wagons and children to be bitten by dogs, and subjected to the power of the water hoses.

Rev. Prathia Hall attended a meeting of SNCC workers with Malcolm in 1965. "His sharp critique of the movement forced persons within the movement to examine their actions and their behavior," she remembered. "He expressed what most black people were feeling."

Black Power and the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense

The Black Panthers emerged from the Freedom Faith of those who could not accept the doctrine of non-violence. It emerged particularly from the anger and humiliation endured by the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) at the Democratic convention of 1964, when black delegates were not allowed to take seats at the convention. It seemed that, once again, freedom faith had been trumped by the pragmatism of politics-as-usual.

SNCC organized the MFDP, and one of its leaders, Stokely Carmichael, a Trinidadian Baptist and a natural rebel, led a radical coalition to power when the dispirited group returned home. That winter, continued white intransigence in Mississippi led to the shooting of James Meredith, the University of Mississippi's first African-American student.

SNCC called for a march from Selma to Montgomery. While marching, Carmichael and other SNCC members took up the call-and-response chant of the black church and made it into a political slogan:

"What do you want?" "Black Power!"

Carmichael left SNCC and formed the Black Panther Political Party in Lowndes County, the county that lay between Selma and Montgomery. It elected the first black sheriff since Reconstruction.

At around the same time, Huey Newton and Eldridge Cleaver, a former minister in the Nation of Islam, founded the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense. They made Stokely Carmichael their Prime Minister.

Carmichael took ideas of separatism and nationalism, which had swirled within the black community since Reconstruction, and stated, "Whites who come into the black community with ideas of change seem to want to absolve the power structure of its responsibility for what it is doing...If we are to proceed toward true liberation, we must cut ourselves off from white people...[otherwise] we will find ourselves entwined in the tentacles of the white power complex that controls this country."

In Oakland, the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense became the center of the Black Power Movement. They were not strictly separatist, and formed alliances with the Weathermen and Students for a Democratic Society. The Panthers carried armed rifles to defend the black community against police brutality and perceived racist threats. They also fought to establish socialism through mass organizing and community-based programs. The Panthers called for radical reform of every aspect of American life: housing, employment, health care, the criminal justice system, education, national security, and the military.

The Black Panther Party imploded in the midst of drugs, infighting, and a sustained FBI counter-intelligence program. Nevertheless, it made a lasting contribution. The Panther's first social action item was the Free Breakfast for Children Program, which spread from one small Catholic church in the Fillmore district of San Francisco, to cities across America. The success of the campaign pressed the federal government to adopt a similar program for the nation's public schools.

Eldridge Cleaver became a born-again Christian in 1974, and died in 1998. Huey Newton was shot and killed in a drug deal gone bad in 1989.

"We were a bunch of kids," recalled Kathleen Cleaver (who divorced her husband after he became born-again) many years later. "We didn't understand the energy required to make real revolution. We discounted the organizing power of the black church, and we didn't understand the spiritual commitment that would be necessary to achieve our goals."

The Black Arts Movement

One month after Malcolm X's assassination in February 1965, the highly respected writer LeRoi Jones moved from Manhattan's Lower East Side to Harlem, from the integrated world where he was a celebrated poet, essayist, and playwright to the black one, where he intended to develop a more political and spiritual art. In Harlem, Jones founded the Black Arts Repertory Theatre/School. At that moment, the Black Arts Movement was born.

Other black artists in the country's history - poet Phyllis Wheatley, painter Henry Tanner, singer Mahalia Jackson - had drawn on the Holy Spirit for inspiration and content. The Black Arts movement attempted to synthesize spirituality and politics while remaining artistically relevant. It was a movement that provided community and spiritual meaning alongside - or, in some cases, in place of - organized religion. In a 1968 essay, "The Black Arts Movement," writer Larry Neal proclaimed Black Arts as the "aesthetic and spiritual sister of the Black Power concept."

Poets and musicians of the Black Arts movement were compared to preachers. "LeRoi Jones (who took the name Amiri Baraka in 1968), Don Lee, Sonia Sanchez, Aretha Franklin, James Brown, The Last Poets - check out the readings they gave in churches," says theologian James Cone. "The poets and the music gave a language to what was happening with black folks at that time."

Black artists produced poetry, music, and literature by black people, for black people, about black people. Their art spoke to the condition of being in America, but not of it. Mixing elements of Malcolm X's message with the wisdom of their grandmothers, they called upon black people to know themselves and their strategies for survival. Their art both celebrated and lampooned the idea of Jesus upon which black America had rested its hopes for so long. Some painted their visions of a black Jesus.

Black Art romanticized Africa as the home of kings, queens, mathematicians and holy men, as though blacks were reaffirming, "God is in Africa, we are of Africa, God is in us." This black aesthetic lived in the culture of the street, presaging rap music and hip-hop.

The Black Arts movement was not entirely separate from organized religion. Abiodun Oyewole of the Last Poets wrote poetry inspired by his practice in the African religion of Yoruba. Although Oyewole makes it clear that going to Church "was totally against the revolutionary rules," black artists "took Jesus and made him [theirs]," rewriting and redrawing to create Jesus in the image of a black man. Writer LeRoi Jones locates the heart of black art in Sunni Islam. "As you begin to beat your way back through the symbols," wrote Jones, "getting close to the source of what Black art is, you begin to see that it comes out of Islam. The closeness of man with natural evidence of Divinity is what art was about in the beginning - to reveal, to manifest Divinity that man can understand; to make images that reveal Divinity, that reveal the presence of the One Force that animates everything."

Kwanzaa

The repeated images of civil rights demonstrators driven by freedom faith being hosed, attacked by dogs, and beaten by police led to the feeling by some that black Americans were relentlessly cast as victims in an epic racist drama. A younger generation rebelled against this stereotype and developed faith in a new black cultural nationalism. During the mid-sixties, these cultural nationalists would join forces with those in the Black Arts movement to spearhead new traditions that drew from age-old African customs and rituals.

Ron Karenga, leader of the organization US, was one of the chief architects. He sought to syncretize traditional African culture and contemporary African-American mores. While the organization US became embroiled in tensions with the Black Panthers and others over its nationalistic direction, Karenga made one lasting contribution to African-American culture: Kwanzaa.

Kwanzaa, a weeklong celebration, commemorates the holiness and wholeness of life. Based on traditional African harvest ceremonies, Kwanzaa ritualizes the Ngozo Saba, the seven principles Karenga felt African American families needed to recover from the brutality of slavery and the trauma of the civil rights movement. It was first celebrated Dec. 26, 1966. Kwanzaa places particular emphasis on the unity of Black families.

The Seven Principles are:

UMOJA (UNITY) (oo-MOE-jah) - To strive for and maintain unity in the family, community, nation, and race;

KUJICHAGULIA (SELF DETERMINATION) (koo-jee-cha-goo-LEE-ah) - To define ourselves, name ourselves, create for ourselves, and speak for ourselves;

UJIMA (COLLECTIVE WORK AND RESPONSIBILITY) (oo-JEE-mah) - To build and maintain our community together, and to make our brothers' and sisters' problems our problems and to solve them together;

UJAMAA (COOPERATIVE ECONOMICS) (oo-JAH-mah) - To build and maintain our own stores, shops, and other businesses, and to profit together from them;

NIA (PURPOSE) (nee-AH) - To make as our collective vocation the building and developing of our community in order to restore our people to their traditional greatness;

KUUMBA (CREATIVITY) (koo-OOM-bah) - To do always as much as we can, in the way that we can, in order to leave our community more beautiful and beneficial than when we inherited it;

IMANI (FAITH) (ee-MAH-nee) - To believe with all our hearts in our parents, our teachers, our leaders, our people, and the righteousness and victory of our struggle.