The Dream is Alive
by Gary Puckrein
The Dilemma of Slavery
In 1776, the Founding Fathers of the United States laid out
a compelling vision of a free and democratic society in which
individual could claim inherent rights over another.
When these men drafted the Declaration of Independence, they
included a passage charging King George III with forcing the
slave trade on the colonies. The original draft, attributed to
Thomas Jefferson, condemned King George for violating the "most
sacred rights of life and liberty of a distant people who never
offended him." After bitter debate, this clause was taken out
of the Declaration at the insistence of Southern states, where
slavery was an institution, and some Northern states whose
merchant ships carried slaves from Africa to the colonies of the
New World.
Thus, even before the United States became a nation, the
conflict between the dreams of liberty and the realities of
18th-century values was joined. But the Declaration of
Independence was only the beginning of a long battle to end
slavery in the United States. As the distinguished 19th-century
black abolitionist Frederick Douglass said: "No one can tell the
day of the month, or the month of the year, upon which slavery
was abolished in the United States. We cannot even tell when it
began to be abolished. Like the movement of the sea, no man can
tell where one wave begins and another ends. The chains of
slavery with us were loosened by degrees."
The mass migration of Africans to North American shores
began in 1619-just 12 years after the founding of Jamestown,
Virginia, the first permanent British colony. The first blacks
were not regarded as slaves. They were looked upon as indentured
servants--as bondsmen for a period who could look forward to
freedom after a term of years. Many whites came to America under
similar circumstances. One of the first blacks to arrive,
Anthony Johnson, received his freedom in a few years. He became
a landowner and a man of wealth, who at one time was himself an
owner of "indentured servants."
By 1661, however, the black, unlike the white indentured
servant, was regarded as a bondsman for life, and this was the
beginning of slavery in the United States.
Africans came to the United States as slaves in shackles and
chains. Denied those rights which others could take for granted,
black Americans committed themselves to the quest for freedom and
dignity guaranteed to all Americans. Ironically, the black
struggle was an extension of the dream of the Founding Fathers
who envisaged a new republic where all men are equal in the eyes
of the law.
Black America produced generation after generation of
leaders who kept this basic dream alive under extreme hardships
and against the views of the majority. The 19th century produced
leaders like Paul Cuffe, Richard Allen, Frederick Douglass,
Harriet Tubman, Ida Wells-Barnett; in the 20th century the names
of W. E. B. Du Bois, James Farmer, A. Philip Randolph, Roy
Wilkins, Whitney Young and Martin Luther King Jr. stand out.
From the beginning, slavery and the second-class treatment
of blacks raised moral questions that white America found
difficult to answer. How could a free society deny equal rights
to some of its members? Blacks well understood the ethical
dilemma that their subjugation posed; over the decades they used
this understanding to push America toward a realization of its
founding principles. The first great struggle toward that
realization was the war against slavery.
Emancipation and Segregation
Although its origins are complex, the immediate cause of the
Civil War (1861-1865) was not the practice of slavery in the
South, but the attempt of the Southern states to secede from the
Union. In addition, the North refused to permit the expansion of
slavery into the new territories of the West. As the bloody
conflict became prolonged, however, Northern war aims shifted to
the elimination of the institution of slavery itself, as well as
the preservation of the Union.
The Emancipation Proclamation, signed by President
Abraham Lincoln in 1863, proclaimed all slaves to be free in
those states that were in rebellion. The Emancipation
Proclamation was a historic political step, but it did not
provide a permanent legal basis for the elimination of slavery.
Two years later, eight months after the end of the Civil War, on
December 18, 1865, the 13th Amendment to the Constitution was
adopted. It reads: Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude
except as punishment for a crime whereof the party shall have
been duly convicted shall exist within the United States or any
place subject to their jurisdiction.
Although the amendment was hailed in the halls of Congress
and by the forces that had worked so long in the abolitionist
movement, many Americans expressed a note of caution. A leading
newspaper said in an editorial: "We are now to concentrate the
whole of American law, justice, conscience, sense of consistency
and duty, and bring all to bear on the work of making the
freedman in every sense a free man and citizen."
Abraham Lincoln did not live to see the final emancipation
of blacks from slavery. Eight months before the adoption of the
13th Amendment, an assassin's bullet ended his life.
America in the last half of the 19th century was not
prepared to treat blacks as equals, particularly in the Southern
states where slavery had once predominated. Southern whites
forced a common front against blacks, and total and complete
disenfranchisement of the freed blacks became the universal aim
of the South. By 1890, blacks had been denied political rights
so successfully that the Atlanta newspaperman, Henry W. Grady,
said, "The Negro as a political force has dropped out of serious
consideration."
The South achieved this goal by pressuring the federal
government not to enforce civil rights laws. The next step was a
series of laws passed by the states called the Black Codes or
"Jim Crow" laws. These laws were supposed to define the rights
of blacks but in practice limited them.
Jim Crow laws were extended to all forms of public
activity-frequently under the force of law, but also as a matter
of custom and tradition. Public accommodations were strictly
segregated; blacks were barred from white hotels, restaurants and
theaters. Trains, depots and wharves were also segregated. In
1896, the Supreme Court upheld the validity of
"separate-but-equal" transportation laws in the famous Plessy v.
Ferguson case. Thereafter, the Jim Crow principle was applied
with inexorable logic. Free access to the marketplace was denied
blacks. Most important of all, in many Southern states the
greatest liberty was denied to blacks-the right to vote.
The period that stretched from 1900 to World War 11
represented a subtle but basic turning point in the black
American experience. When the era opened, conditions seemed
almost hopeless, and blacks were indeed a downtrodden people.
Origins of a Movement
At the turn of the century, dissatisfied with the absence of
racial equality, a group of Northern black intellectuals began to
agitate anew for a restoration of civil rights.
W.E.B. Du Bois became the most prominent black spokesman of
this group. In 1905, he led a meeting to inaugurate an organized
program of public agitation for black rights. In 1909, Du Bois
and other conference participants joined with white liberals to
found the National Association for the Advancement of Colored
People (NAACP).
The new organization declared itself against forced
segregation. It was for equal educational opportunities and
complete enfranchisement of black Americans. It adopted tactics
of agitation and court action to realize these goals. The
organization's major objective during its first half century of
existence was to secure legislation and court decisions
establishing equality for blacks in voting, civil rights, housing
and education. It campaigned against all forms of private and
public discrimination, especially in federal employment and
military sense. The programs of the NAACP were made more
effective by an important change in demographic patterns.
By 1890, because of the industrial revolution, blacks in the
South were being replaced in the fields by machines. Slowly but
inexorably large numbers of blacks drifted north to find work.
The migration was spurred by World War I which created new jobs
in the defense industries of the North.
The crowding of blacks into formerly white areas of the
North created new problems. As the war drew to a close, whites
became alarmed at the rising rate of unemployment caused by the
war's end and the influx of blacks eager to work. Riots broke
out in many cities. They were ugly and cruel and focused
Northern attention on the injustices still being inflicted on
black Americans.
Increasingly, blacks perceived city hall, the state capital
and the federal government as appropriate targets for their
efforts. They sought ways to harness and use their political
strength to encourage government at all levels to do more for
black America. In Northern cities blacks were urged to vote.
Even in the South they became more active politically-but always
under severe restraint and sometimes under the threat of
violence.
Interracial reform, even with the help of activist white
liberals moved very slowly, and it took the extensive disruptions
of World War II to shatter established patterns of segregation.
Thoughtful whites became painfully aware of the contradiction in
fighting the racist philosophy of Nazism in Europe while
permitting racial discrimination at home.
In this context of changing international trends and
shifting American opinion, the campaign for black rights
broadened. The NAACP piled up victory upon victory in the
courts. It successfully attacked racially restrictive covenants
in housing, segregation in interstate transportation and
discrimination in publicly owned recreational facilities.
Blacks fought gallantly in World War II and grew impatient
with the intransigence of the opponents of civil rights. They
became bolder and more aggressive and began to press for their
rights with relentless vigor. They had proved themselves in
battle, and they wanted America to live up to the ideals for
which they had fought and died. Ironically, it was only after
World War 11 that the armed forces were desegregated.
Equal Education
In the summer of 1950, a group of lawyers associated with
the NAACP, in collaboration with social scientists and educators,
attempted a bold, all-out frontal assault on educational
segregation. Thurgood Marshall, counsel for the NAACP Legal
Defense and Educational Fund, presented five cases to the Supreme
Court in 1952 involving a challenge to segregated public
education.
In a landmark 1954 case called Brown v. the Board of
Education, Chief Justice Earl Warren said, "In the field of
public education, the doctrine of 'separate but equal' has no
place. Separate education facilities are inherently unequal.
Therefore, we hold that the plaintiffs and others similarly
situated ... are ... deprived of the equal protection of the laws
guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment."
Many states took quick action to abide by the Supreme Court
decision but others, notably in the South, either ignored the
decision or sought ways to evade implementing it. While the
federal government allowed each state much discretion in setting
the goals for desegregation, it left no doubt that further
segregation in public educational facilities would not be
tolerated. When Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas,
opened in September 1957, the state national guard was called out
to prevent blacks from entering the school. President Dwight D.
Eisenhower ordered federal troops into Little Rock to enforce the
court order, and black children went to the school under the
watchful eyes of federal troops. State-supported resistance to
desegregation did not end with the Little Rock case, but over the
years the courts have consistently ruled in favor of
desegregation. Although racial integration of schools remains a
concern, today the fight for desegregation has been largely
replaced by the fight for quality education.
Montgomery, Alabama
Just one year after the landmark Supreme Court decision
desegregating public schools, a small and apparently
insignificant human drama took place which capitulated the civil
rights movement from the courts into the streets.
On a cold day in December 1955, Rosa Parks finished her
workday as a seamstress and waited for a city bus in Montgomery,
Alabama, to take her home. She had worked hard that day and was
tired. She wanted nothing more than to sit down in a warm bus
and rest until she got home. But the laws of Alabama decreed
that whites had preference for the seats in the front of the bus.
When a white male boarded the bus, the driver asked Mrs.
Parks move to the rear. Fed up with the "Southern way of life,"
she replied, "I don't think I should have to move." The driver
had a policeman arrest her, thereby launching the modem-day civil
rights movement.
Blacks, under the leadership of a local minister named
Martin Luther King Jr. organized a boycott of the Montgomery bus
company. For 12 months, makeshift car pools substituted for
public transportation. At first the bus company scoffed at the
black protest, but as the economic effects of the boycott were
felt, the company sought a settlement. Meanwhile, legal action
ended the bus segregation policy. On June 5, 1956, a federal
district court ruled that the bus segregation policy violated the
Fourteenth Amendment, which forbids the states from denying equal
rights to any citizen. Later that year, the Supreme Court
affirmed the judgment. The boycott ended, and it thrust into
national prominence a person who clearly possessed charismatic
leadership, Martin Luther King,Jr.
Martin Luther King, Jr.
King was born on January 15, 1929, the second of three
children. His father was a Baptist minister. He attended public
elementary and high schools as well as the private Laboratory
High School of Atlanta University. King entered Morehouse
College at age 15 in September 1944 as a special student. He
received a bachelor's degree in sociology in 1948. In the fall
of that year, King enrolled at Crozier Theological Seminary in
Chester, Pennsylvania, and received his Bachelor of Divinity
degree three years later. King was awarded a doctorate by Boston
University in 1955. While attending Boston University, he met
Coretta Scott whom he married in June 1953. Early in 1954, King
accepted his first pastorate at the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church
in Montgomery. He had been a resident in Montgomery less than
one year when Parks defied the ordinance regulating segregated
seating on municipal transportation.
King, urged by prominent black Baptist ministers in the
South to assume a larger role in the struggle for black civil
rights following the successful boycott, accepted the presidency
of the newly formed Southern Christian Leadership Conference
(SCLC). In January 1960, he resigned his Montgomery pastorate
and moved to Atlanta, Georgia, where the SCLC had its
headquarters.
The Polities of Nonviolent Protest
Unlike the great majority of civil rights activists who have
regarded nonviolence as a convenient tactic. King followed
Gandhi's principles of pacifism. In King's view, civil rights
demonstrators, who were beaten and jailed by hostile whites,
educated and transformed their oppressors through the redemptive
character of their unmerited suffering.
King entered the civil rights struggle at the same time that
the federal government was beginning to reaffirm the principles
of equality. In 1957 President Eisenhower presented a four-point
proposal for protecting civil rights. Passed by Congress and
signed by the president, the proposal became the first civil
rights law to be enacted by the U.S. government since the 19th
century. It authorize the federal government to bring civil
suits in federal court when any person was denied or threatened
in his or her right to vote. It elevated the civil rights
section of the Department of Justice to the status of a division,
with an assistant attorney general in charge. It also created
the United States Commission on Civil Rights, which has authority
to investigate allegations of denials of the right to vote, to
study and collect information concerning legal developments
constituting a denial of equal protection of the laws and to
appraise the laws and policies of the federal government with
respect to equal protection. The nation was slowly moving closer
to a fuller realization of the dream of its Founding Fathers, but
for black Americans the pace was not quick enough, and they
challenged local laws and customs to force change.
On February 1, 1960, four black students from North Carolina
Agricultural and Technical College in Greensboro, North Carolina,
entered a variety store, made several purchases, sat down at the
lunch counter and ordered coffee. They were refused service, but
undaunted they remained in their seats until the store closed.
This was the beginning of the sit-in movement. In the spring
and summer of 1960, young people, white and black, participated
in similar peaceful forms of protest against segregation and
discrimination. The movement spread quickly in the South and to
several places in the North. Segregated libraries, beaches and
hotels became the targets of the demonstrators.
The SCLC helped the students organize the Student Nonviolent
Coordinating Committee (SNCC), at a meeting held at Shaw
University in Raleigh, North Carolina, to coordinate the
protests. As a direct result of the sit-ins, lunch counters
across the South began to serve blacks, and other public
facilities were desegregated.
An important interplay of action and response developed
between government and civil rights advocates. And it was this
interplay that did so much to quicken the pace of social change.
By the summer of 1960, the question of the status of blacks
had become a major political issue. The two major political
parties, facing the presidential campaign of 1960, recognized the
significance of the black vote in a close election. There were
already more than one million registered black voters in 12
Southern states. In at least six of the eight most populous
states in the country, blacks potentially held the balance of
power in closely contested elections. In their platforms in
1960, both major parries made strong stands for racial justice
and equality. The election of 1960 was close, the closest
presidential election of the century, and when the votes were
counted, blacks had reason to believe that they shared in the
victory of John F. Kennedy.
Soon, civil rights advocates were applying new pressures to
secure equal fights for blacks. In May 1961, the Congress of
Racial Equality (CORE), an interracial direct action group
founded in 1942, sent black and white activists called "freedom
riders" into the South aboard buses to test segregation laws and
practices in interstate transportation. In many cities the
interracial teams were attacked on highways and in bus stations
by angry segregationists.
From Birmingham to the March on Washington
The most critical direct action demonstration began in
Birmingham, Alabama, on April 3, 1963, under the leadership of
Dr. King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. The
demonstrators demanded fair employment opportunities,
desegregation of public facilities and the creation of a
committee to plan desegregation.
For a month the demonstration was notable merely because of
the large number of participants, including many schoolchildren,
and the large number of arrests. King himself was arrested and,
while imprisoned, wrote his celebrated "Letter from a Birmingham
jail" to fellow clergymen critical of his tactics of civil
disobedience (see excerpts, page 14). King was arrested more
than seven times during his many civil rights campaigns
throughout the South.
On May 3, the Birmingham police attacked the marchers with
dogs and high-pressure water hoses. The police action made
front-page news across the country and triggered sympathetic
demonstrations all over the nation.
During the week of May 18, the Department of Justice counted
43 major and minor demonstrations, 10 of them in Northern cities.
The Birmingham demonstration did not bring the concessions that
the marchers sought, but the protest was enormously important
because it compelled the American people to face the problem of
discrimination in a way they had never done before. For the
first time in American history, the president appeared before the
nation and declared that race discrimination was a moral issue.
A few days later he submitted a new and broadened civil fights
program to Congress. The bill containing President Kennedy's
recommendation occupied much of the attention of Congress during
the summer of 1963. As Congress and the nation debated the
proposed civil fights bill, black activists planned a mammoth
peaceful demonstration of Americans from all walks of life aimed
at hastening progress and showing interracial agreement.
In 1962, A. Philip Randolph, a noted civil rights activist
and labor leader, sent out a call to black groups to participate
in a "March on Washington" to protest the slow pace of
desegregation. His call was greeted with mixed reactions. In
the wake of Birmingham and its galvanizing effect on the black
community, many were eager to participate in a mass effort that
they hoped would show their impatience. Dr. King argued that a
march would dramatize the issue at hand and mobilize support from
all parts of the country.
Those who discounted the appeal of the march were astounded
to discover that it was receiving broad support from many sectors
of American life. All of the major civil rights groups were
joined by religious, labor and civic organizations in planning
and executing the gigantic demonstration. On August 28, 1963,
more than 250,000 Americans from many religious and ethnic
backgrounds converged on Washington, staging the largest
demonstration in the history of the nation's capital. The
orderly procession moved from the Washington Monument to the
Lincoln Memorial, where A. Philip Randolph, Martin Luther King
Jr., Roy Wilkins, Walter Reuther (a labor leader) and others
addressed the throng. King electrified the demonstrators with an
eloquent articulation of the American dream and his hope that it
would be fully realized.
A mesmerizing speaker, King gave what was later acknowledged
to be one of the greatest speeches in American history at the
March on Washington. Entitled "I Have a Dream," the speech
outlined his hopes for a time when his "four little children will
one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the
color of their skin but by the content of their character."
In one of the most famous passages from the speech, King
declared:
"When we allow freedom to ring, when we let it ring from
every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city,
we will be able to speed up that day when all God's children,
black men and white men, Jews and gentiles, Protestants and
Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of
the old Negro spiritual 'Free at last. Free at last. Thank God
Almighty, we are free at last'"
Legislating Civil Rights
Many were chagrined that the March on Washington did not
bring about the immediate passage of President Kennedy's civil
rights program as they had hoped. Civil rights supporters were
further shaken by the assassination of President Kennedy in
Dallas, Texas, on November 22, 1963.
Lyndon B. Johnson, the 36th president of the United States,
was quick to make known his strong support of Kennedy's civil
rights program, and through his efforts the Civil Rights Act of
1964 was passed. The most far-reaching and comprehensive law in
support of racial equality ever enacted by Congress, the
legislation gave the attorney general additional power to protect
citizens against discrimination and segregation in voting,
education and the use of public facilities. It outlawed
discrimination in most places of public accommodation;
established a federal Community Relations Service (to help
individuals and communities solve civil rights problems) and a
federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission; and extended the
life of the Commission on Civil Rights. The U.S. Office of
Education was empowered to provide technical and financial aid to
assist communities in the desegregation of schools. Finally, it
requited the elimination of discrimination in federally assisted
programs, authorizing termination of programs or withdrawal of
federal funds for noncompliance. While some blacks criticized
the act for not going far enough, others were delighted that a
semblance of equality might now be attainable.
Carrying on the Dream
In 1964, in recognition of his work and leadership, King was
awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo, Norway. Accepting the
award on behalf of the civil rights movement, Dr. King said,
"Sooner or later, all the people of the world will have to
discover a way to live together in peace, and thereby transform
this pending cosmic elegy into a creative psalm of brotherhood."
King continued working to integrate housing, jobs and
schools to make the dream of racial equality a reality. In March
1965, he led a celebrated 87-kilometer march from Selma, Alabama,
to Montgomery-in the face of hostility from state officials and
attacks by white Southerners-to dramatize the need for a federal
voting rights bill. This landmark legislation, the Voting Rights
Act, was passed by Congress in 19665. It permitted federal
examiners to register voters in localities where discrimination
had occurred. In subsequent years, black voting in the South-and
the numbers of black elected officials-increased enormously.
A year later, James Meredith, the first black to enter the
University of Mississippi, was wounded during a lone march across
the state of Mississippi. King immediately went to Mississippi
and, joined by hundreds of others,' completed Meredith's march.
In Mississippi, King faced a split in the ranks of the civil
rights movement as younger, more militant members first raised
the cry of "black power" and rejected his philosophy of
non-violence. Despite this shift toward militancy on the part of
black groups in the late 1960s, King never wavered in his
commitment to the principles and practice of nonviolence to
achieve his aims of social justice and human dignity.
With the successful implementation of the Civil Rights Act
of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, King increasingly
devoted his time to the issue of poverty in the United States.
He began to organize a "Poor People's March on Washington" to
dramatize the need for jobs, education and better living
conditions for the nation's poor. Tragically, on April 4, 1968,
he was assassinated by a sniper as he stood on a balcony in
Memphis, Tennessee, where he had gone to support a strike of
sanitation workers.
As a result of his efforts, and those of the thousands of
Americans -black and white-who labored alongside him, America has
moved boldly toward the vision of a society where all people are
equal in the eyes of the law, no matter the color of their skin.
It was in recognition of King's prodigious achievements
that, on November 2, 1983, President Ronald Reagan signed a bill
making the third Monday in January a federal holiday in honor of
the birth of Dr. King. For the first time, the nation honors a
black American; the dream is alive and shaping the destiny of the
country.
Responding to the president at the signing ceremony
establishing the federal holiday, Coretta Scott King, now
director of the Martin Luther King Center for Nonviolent Social
Change, said:
"In his own life's example, he symbolized what was right
about America, what was noblest and best, what human beings have
pursued since the beginning of history. He loved
unconditionally. He was in constant pursuit of truth, and when
he discovered it, he embraced it. His nonviolent campaigns
brought about redemption, reconciliation and justice. He taught
us that only peaceful means can bring about peaceful ends, that
our goal was to create the love community."
NOTE: Author Gary A. Puckrein is the publisher of "American
Visions," a magazine of
Afro-American culture published by the Smithsonian Institution.
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