Civil Rights Movement of The 1960s

CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT OF THE 1960S. The movement to uproot segregation laws in the South and obtain full civil liberties for African Americans in all states was sparked by a 1954 Supreme Court decision that declared segregated schools unconstitutional. Despite the seemingly modest aim of simply obtaining rights already guaranteed by existing federal law, the movement’s goals could not be realized without a fundamental change in American society. Massive popular resistance to that change was immediate and was vigorously supported by local and state governments, which often tolerated anti-movement vigilante violence. The federal government, while ostensibly supportive of the movement, usually intervened belatedly and halfheartedly.

From the onset the civil rights movement was “charged” with being Communist-inspired and subversive. The struggle would indeed attract many radical activists, and rebels of varied ideological orientation and in specific locales would reactivate radical-liberal alliances destabilized by McCarthyism. Three major currents came to dominate a multifaceted national movement. The largest group accepted the leadership of the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., and his Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), which was founded in 1957 following the successful Montgomery bus boycott of 1955–1956. From this general orbit came the younger and more dynamic Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), founded in 1960. Separate from the two southern-based organizations but converging with them over a period of time were black liberation/black power currents, mainly headquartered in northern cities.

Martin Luther King first came to prominence when the leadership of the Montgomery bus boycott was all but forced on him. Many of his closest advisers were also Baptist ministers, but two, Bayard Rustin and Stanley D. Levison, were representatives of what came to be called the Old Left. Rustin, who had been a Communist for a brief period in the 1930s, was closely allied with the most militant pacifist organizations, while Levison had been a fundraiser for Communist Party causes for many years and still retained informal ties to the party.

The tradition represented by Rustin was not new to King. He had studied the ideas of Walter Rauschenbusch, Reinhold Niebuhr, Mahatma Gandhi, and A. J. Muste while in college and had concluded that the Hegelian dialectic could be interpreted in a Christian context. King believed nonviolent resistance to evil could activate the moral center of humanity, effecting a profound and lasting change in human relationships. This view would be the hallmark of his political commitment. Rustin provided King with a direct link to the established pacifist Left and served as a logistics officer for specific campaigns such as the historic 1963 march on Washington.

Levison embodied the Popular Front approach in which the interests of labor, the nation, and racial minorities were seen as convergent. With ties to various elements of the New Deal coalition, he was a highly sophisticated and successful fundraiser. A nearly irreplaceable figure in the early years, he was sought for advice on all major problems, and like Rustin, he edited some of King’s writing. When the issue of his links to the Communist Party was raised by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Kennedy brothers forced King to promise that he would cease consulting with Levison, but King continued to do so in a semisecretive fashion. Levison ended his informal ties to the Party in 1963.

Another SCLC staffer with Communist links was Jack O’Dell, a black organizer recruited by Levison. O’Dell had been active in Communist causes throughout the 1950s, and FBI reports state he was a concealed Party member with a seat on the National Committee. For a short time, Levison and O’Dell constituted the New York SCLC, and various appointments and contacts flowed through their office. O’Dell eventually resigned his post under the pressure of the Communist issue because SCLC was determined to avoid being labeled “subversive.”

King never made a public statement that he was a socialist, but he had questioned capitalist ethics as early as college and often told his aides that he was indeed a socialist. Upon Levison’s advice he adopted the term “socialized democrat” for public utterances. King was greatly impressed by the social democracy he witnessed in Scandinavia when he accepted the Nobel Peace Prize (1964), and in the United States he had contacts with socialists such as Michael Harrington. Late in 1967 various radicals approached him about heading a third-party effort, a course he ultimately rejected.

The war in Vietnam was another radicalizing force on King. Conservative civil rights leaders urged him to remain silent on the issue because opposition to the war would further strain the already fragile federal support for the movement and would surely alienate some segments of the general public. Although he held the view that the war was a moral blight for many years, he did not make a public statement until 1966. After that his leadership of parades and other anti-war efforts brought him more deeply into the orbit of traditional radical-liberal coalitions.

Leftist influences, however, had been present in King’s movement from its genesis. Rosa Parks, the woman whose refusal to move to the back of the bus set off the Montgomery boycott, had previously attended training classes at the radical Highlander Folk School, and a major boycott organizer, E. D. Nixon, had been a lifelong associate of A. Philip Randolph. SCLC would have continuing contacts with Highlander and with Left support groups such as the Southern Conference Educational Fund.

Although the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and other established civil rights organizations had expelled Communists from their ranks to accommodate McCarthyism, any local campaign was likely to include radical veterans of battles in which the Communist Party had played a major role.

The perspective of SNCC was different. Rather than concentrating on building campaigns around a single issue and a celebrated leader, SNCC organized communities for long-term structural change. SNCC organizers lived in the communities being mobilized and tried to develop indigenous leaders. Nonviolence was less a philosophical imperative than a chosen tactical option given that the immediate opposition was often led by sheriffs, police chiefs, or officers of the National Guard. Rather than taking counsel from the Old Left, some of the founders of the New Left looked to SNCC as a model. Several of the early members of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS)—Casey Hayden, Betty Garman, Jim Onsonis, Bob Zellner, and Maria Varela—had first been active in SNCC. Tom Hayden, for one, has stated that SDS’s concepts of participatory democracy and organizing oneself out of the organizer’s job were directly inspired by SNCC.

Unlike SCLC, which was terrified of being tarred as Communist-dominated, SNCC adopted a policy of barring no one on ideological grounds. Against the advice of and despite occasional threats by established leaders, SNCC accepted the assistance of radical groups such as the National Lawyers Guild. FBI reports stated that children of prominent Communists could be found working on SNCC projects and that SNCC facilities carried literature from many radical groups, including the Communist Party. The FBI also noted that SNCC knowingly cooperated with the Communist Party-sponsored W. E. B. DuBois Clubs during demonstrations at Texas Southern University, allowed the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) and its youth group, the Young Socialist Alliance, to raise funds on its behalf, and sent representatives to SDS conventions.

The origins of SNCC, however, had not been ideological. SNCC had come into existence as a response to segregation laws in the South and what was perceived as inadequate militancy on the part of SCLC. Disappointed that the United States failed to live up to its ideals when called to account, and themselves victims of state-sponsored and state-tolerated violence, SNCC activists sought philosophical and ideological grounding. Frantz Fanon and Che Guevara were more widely read than Marx, and current events in China, Africa, and Cuba seemed far more relevant than the October Revolution. SNCC representatives accepted invitations to visit North Vietnam, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Japan, Israel, and the Soviet Union. SNCC became involved with the war crimes tribunal headed by Bertrand Russell and administered at the time by Trotskyist Ralph Schoenman. The most frequent of the SNCC travelers was Stokely Carmichael, who began to shape a Pan-Africanist Marxist perspective. His most dramatic foreign appearance was at a congress of intellectuals held in Havana in 1967.

No single ideology ever captured the SNCC core. In some areas of Mississippi, activists were inclined to the perspectives of the Industrial Workers of the World, while in Atlanta, one of the major SNCC centers, influential individuals had ties with the Revolutionary Action Movement. At the same time that black Trotskyists were active in SNCC’s National Black Antiwar Antidraft Union, other SNCC members attended youth conferences in Moscow. This internal search for a unifying political perspective ultimately was resolved not by the adoption of a revolutionary theory but by the sense that the time had come for an all-black organization whose message to would-be white allies was to organize their own communities. This concept emerged into public view as the “Black Power” slogan of 1966 and soon swept the entire civil rights movement.

The appeal of Black Power was directly related to the murders, bombings, beatings, and other brutal reactions to the voter registration drives, the failure of the federal government to protect the constitutional rights of activists, and the rejection of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party at the 1964 Democratic National Convention. Disillusionment with what could be expected from white power structures also amounted to a de facto repudiation of nonviolence. In 1967 SNCC came out in support of the Puerto Rican independence movement and signed “treaties” of cooperation with Hopi leader Tomas Banyaca and Mexican-American rebel Reyes Tijerina. But Black Power cost SNCC dearly. Trusted white organizers had to leave and former sources of financial support dried up. Most damaging of all was the disaffection of large segments of a black southern constituency whose desire remained integration, not voluntary separatism.

If SNCC were to survive, it would have to find a new base of African American support. Stokely Carmichael believed the future lay in an alliance with the Black Panther Party (BPP) founded in Oakland, California, in 1966. The BPP founders had said SNCC was their direct inspiration and that their logo had been taken from SNCC graphics found in Lowndes County, Alabama. The appeal of the BPP was that it was in a period of rapid growth and its strength in the black community was augmented by good relations with white radicals organized in groups such as California Newsreel and the Peace and Freedom Party.

California was also home to black groups hostile to the BPP. Among these was the Los Angeles-based US, an organization espousing a blend of black nationalism and socialism created by its flamboyant leader, Ron Karenga. US and the BPP had physical as well as verbal confrontations. Carmichael believed a revitalized SNCC could halt such infighting and meld militant local groups scattered throughout the country into a powerful national presence. He agreed to a fusion of SNCC and the BPP as a starting point, and he presided over a large rally in Los Angeles in which US and other smaller organizations peacefully participated alongside the BPP.

The fusion with the BPP was mainly a one-man show, for most of the SNCC core no longer recognized Carmichael’s leadership, much less supported his nearly unilateral dissolution of their group into another organization. The official SNCC leader was H. Rap Brown, but he soon went into hiding when car bombs killed his closest associates, one of whom was longtime SNCC activist Ralph Featherstone. James Foreman tried to guide SNCC toward organizing black workers and eventually led a number of associates into the Detroit-based League of Revolutionary Black Workers as a prelude to building a socialist Black Workers Congress. Frances Beal used SNCC elements to build the Third World Woman’s Alliance, an organization that would have considerable impact. Other SNCC workers persevered in local projects that often included municipal or state electoral campaigns. The various SNCC factions went in so many different directions that a 1971 FBI report declared that the organization had ceased to exist.

The Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) experienced a process similar to that of SNCC. When James Farmer became head of CORE in 1961, he and Bayard Rustin organized conferences in various cities with the cooperation of direct-action pacifist groups. The result was the Freedom Rides campaign, which was modeled on an earlier effort organized by the Fellowship of Reconciliation, the group from which CORE originated. The heroic Freedom Rides established CORE as a major civil rights group. The most racially integrated of the action organizations, CORE played a role in community organizing, voter registration, and support of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. But as beatings and murders mounted without adequate federal response, many CORE cadre became disenchanted with nonviolence as a way of life and began to carry arms. In 1964 whites were asked to play a less prominent public role at the urging of James Farmer, who wished the organization to remain racially integrated, but in 1967, under the leadership of Floyd McKissick, CORE became all-black. Its influence faded quickly. Roy Innis became leader in 1968 and transformed CORE into a black nationalist organization without any ties to its pacifist origins. The organization survived as a personal forum for Innis but without any mass base.

The separatist tide that prevailed with the “Black Power” slogan was linked to a black nationalism that went back to 1920s activists such as Marcus Garvey and black scholars such as J. A. Rogers, who had traced the contributions of Africans throughout world history. During the years when SCLC, SNCC, and CORE were most active, their strategy was to confine actions to the South and use the North to raise funds and recruit volunteers. Their target constituencies for organization were churchgoers and the college educated. One result of this perspective was that direct action in the North was mainly left to local groups, and the needs of the most blighted sectors of the black community, particularly the population that came to be called the underclass, were rarely addressed.

The organization that emerged to fill some of the political vacuum in the North was the Nation of Islam, much of whose appeal was a black separatism based on personal regeneration and discipline. Popularly called the Black Muslims, the Nation of Islam was highly unorthodox in its teaching that white people were representatives of the devil. Although the formal leader was Elijah Muhammad, an aged figure who spent most of his time in Chicago, the charismatic leader of the Black Muslims was Malcolm X. Like many Black Muslims, Malcolm X had been a criminal. Under his direction the Nation of Islam intensified an already vigorous recruitment in urban ghettos and prisons. While espousing a communal self-sufficiency that was sometimes dubbed “black capitalism,” the Muslims offered a merciless attack on America’s racial hypocrisy at home and abroad and were adamant about their right to self-defense. Many African Americans who could not accept the Muslims on religious grounds admired their pride, militancy, and self-sufficiency.

Malcolm X developed a speaking style that provided a systematic critique of U.S. foreign and domestic policies in terms easily comprehended by urban audiences of limited formal education. His speeches also began to attract the admiration of radicals. The SWP, in particular, believed he would eventually drop his separatist views and become a major leader of black America and perhaps the socialist movement itself. Acting on this premise, the SWP sponsored forums at which he spoke and diligently collected his writings and made recordings of his key speeches. While Malcolm X was not about to join the SWP and it is not clear exactly what he thought about Trotskyism, he was certainly aware that socialists were responding to his message.

Following a 1964 trip to Mecca and extensive travel in North Africa, Malcolm X set out in a new political direction. He broke with Elijah Muhammad on grounds of religion and personal corruption. Although he remained an orthodox Muslim himself, Malcolm X’s new political base, the Organization of Afro-American Unity, had no religious or ideological criteria. He was now ready to mobilize a vast range of admirers, including leftists such as actor Ossie Davis, militant writers such as James Baldwin, influential journalists such as the Amsterdam News’s James Hicks, and prominent nationalists such as Harlem bookstore owner Louis Micheaux. Although Malcolm X expressed a growing interest in what was happening in China, no less a figure than Martin Luther King announced his pleasure that Malcolm X had joined the mainstream civil rights movement.

Malcolm X undertook a speaking tour of college campuses, where enthusiastic audiences were often predominantly white. He was also the object of constant death threats. As he dictated his autobiography to Alex Haley, he said he did not expect to live long enough to read his own book. He was assassinated in 1965 just as the book was becoming available. Black Muslims were eventually convicted for the murder, but there is considerable scholarship that points in other directions. Before his death, Malcolm X had said he had created the military apparatus of the Nation of Islam and knew what it could and could not do. In his opinion, the attacks and pressures he had experienced were beyond their power and could only be possible through governmental assistance.

The anger that Malcolm X had sought to channel into political action exploded in the Watts riots of the summer of 1965. A string of uprisings followed, culminating in the massive Newark and Detroit rebellions of 1967, the costliest in American history. These insurrectional outbursts made it evident to all that urban blacks had not been appeased by the passage of the Voting Rights Act (1964), school desegregation efforts, and other gains secured by the King-led movement. King himself thought the concessions he won were often only sops to stave off more violence. While King accepted any gains that were available, the advances were not the result of the moral regeneration he had sought to foster through nonviolent resistance. He also understood that the personal respect shown to him was often a means of keeping the spotlight from more volatile leaders. While personally willing to suffer whatever misfortune might flow from continued nonviolent resistance, he questioned how long he could continue to ask others to follow a course that was inevitably met by violent counterattacks. Whatever viability remained in the nonviolent tradition was largely dispelled when King was assassinated in 1968.

No successor to King was able to emerge from the SCLC milieu, and, like SNCC and CORE, SCLC was doomed to political oblivion. New organizations such as the BPP and the League of Revolutionary Black Workers were unable to regroup the collapsing movement. Malcolm X would prove as irreplaceable as King despite the attempts of Eldridge Cleaver, George Jackson, and Stokely Carmichael to carry his banner. The Nation of Islam also split, with the largest formation becoming totally orthodox in its teachings but also largely apolitical.

Rather than expanding to ever larger arenas in the 1970s, the civil rights movement contracted to local venues. Many individual activists and grass-roots organizations took part in efforts to win city, county, and state offices. In the North as well as the South, there was a rising tide of black mayors and state legislators along with a minor uptick in black congressmen. During the Carter administration, there were some advances at the federal level as well, the post of ambassador to the United Nations going to Andrew Young, one of King’s closest advisers. The ultimate heir of the electoral tradition, however, was to be Jesse Jackson, formerly one of SCLC’s younger staffers and not especially close to King.
After creating a self-help group in Chicago, Jackson emerged in the 1980s as leader of the Rainbow Coalition, a vaguely defined movement that sought to unite various dissident sectors of American society with a sharp focus on race, class, and sexual exploitation. Some members of the coalition hoped it would become a third party while others saw it as a pressure group within the Democratic Party. Although the Rainbow Coalition eventually disintegrated, the black voting blocs made possible through the civil rights agitation centered around SCLC and SNCC had become the most dependable Democratic constituency and the most liberal voters in the United States. Not coincidentally, some former activists of SNCC, such as John Lewis, were elected under the Democratic banner to Congress and a variety of lesser offices. Movement veterans who felt a third party was essential for fundamental change were attracted to the New Party, the Labor Party, various Green formations, and independent campaigns, particularly for nonpartisan local office.

The phase of the historic drive for racial equality that began in the 1950s and persisted to the early 1970s had always been a house of its own, a reaction to American injustice under the direct inspiration of American ideals as stated in the Declaration of Independence and codified in the Civil War amendments to the Constitution. Many radical individuals and organizations were attracted to its massive and heroic efforts to redress historic wrongs. These radical forces never dominated, much less led, the movement, but they were part of the broad process of change, their ideas influenced by, as well as influencing, the dramatic course of events.

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Breitman, George. The Last Year of Malcolm X: The Evolution of a Revolutionary. New York: Pathfinder Press, 1967.

Breitman, George, Herman Porter, and Baxter Smith. The Assassination of Malcolm X. New York: Pathfinder Press, 1976.

Carson, Clayborne. In Struggle: SNCC and the Black Awakening of the 1960s. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1980.

Garrow, David J. Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. New York: William Morrow, 1986.

Garrow, David J. The FBI and Martin Luther King. New York: W. W. Norton, 1981.

Horne, Gerald. The Fire This Time: The Watts Uprising and the 1960s. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1995.