Unit
Years: 1955-1968
Culture & Community
Freedom & Equal Rights
Prior to this lesson, students should be familiar with Jim Crow laws in the South, and the political, economic, and social discrimination and inequality that Black Americans faced as a result of Jim Crow laws. Knowledge of the NAACP’s legal strategy of the civil rights movement and events of the 1950s would also complement this lesson.
No single leader or ideology constituted the civil rights movement. Instead, the movement’s leaders and adherents offered different explanations of the causes of inequality in America, different solutions, and different visions of an ideal world. Growing frustration with the gradual, hard-won progress of the late 1950s and early 1960s led to a radicalization of the movement by the late 1960s under the banner of “Black Power.”
Introduction
In World War II, many African Americans fought and died for freedom abroad, only to return home to racist oppression from Jim Crow laws in the south and political and economic inequality in the North. This hypocrisy fueled a new wave of Black political activism now known as the civil rights movement. Although they did not always agree on the methods or final goal of their struggle, Black activists worked all over the country to challenge racism and discrimination.
Nonviolence
Perhaps the best known of the civil rights leaders, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968) drew on the techniques of Mahatma Gandhi “to ‘get in’ rather than to overthrow” American society and to use nonviolent action to expose the inherent violence of American racism. Dr. King gained national prominence when he supported the Montgomery bus boycott of 1955 and became the leader of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) two years later. The SCLC coordinated nonviolent actions—civil disobedience, marches, and boycotts—and coordinated voter registration efforts in the South. Dr. King and the SCLC collaborated with other nonviolent groups such as the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) to organize several prominent demonstrations throughout the 1960s, including the March on Washington and the Selma to Montgomery march for voting rights. SNCC brought student leaders to the forefront of the nonviolent movement, including Ella Baker, who organized several student sit-ins to protest segregation and argued that grassroots community organizing–rather than charismatic leaders–should form the foundation of the civil rights movement.
Black Power
Progress with the nonviolent movement was slow, and some activists grew frustrated. A more radical approach to achieving civil rights emerged in the Black Power movement, advanced by leaders such as Stokely Carmichael of the Black Panther Party for Self Defense, and Malcolm X of the Nation of Islam and later, the Organization of Afro-American Unity. Unlike nonviolent activists, the Black Power movement leaders did not believe that integration into White society would lead to equality for Black Americans. Instead, the Black Power movement advocated for racial justice “by any means necessary,” including violence in situations of self-defense. Movement leaders highlighted Black virtue and sought to empower Black communities, advocating for forming thriving, self-sufficient Black communities that set their own agendas, outside of the confines and norms of White America. Further, the Black Panther Party encouraged mutual aid through programs such as the Black-led school breakfast program. Some Black Power leaders also supported black nationalism, a separatist ideology that advocated for the creation of a separate Black nation.
Barnett, Bernice McNair. “Angela Davis and Women, Race, & Class: A Pioneer in Integrative RGC Studies.” Race, Gender & Class, vol. 10, no. 3, 2003, pp. 9–22. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/41675085. Accessed 16 Apr. 2023.
Birnbaum, Jonathan and Clarence Taylor, ed. Civil Rights Since 1787: A Reader on the Black Struggle. New York University Press: New York, 2000.
Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution. Directed by Stanley Nelson, Jr., Firelight Films, 2015.
“Black Power.” The Martin Luther King, Jr., Research and Education Institute, Stanford University, 20 Jan. 2022, https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/encyclopedia/black-power.
Carmichael, Stokely and Hamilton, Charles. Black Power: The Politics of Liberation in America. New York: Vintage Book/Random House, 1967.
Carson, Clayborne et al., gen. Ed. The Eyes on the Prize Civil Rights Reader: Documents, Speeches, and Firsthand Accounts from the Black Freedom Struggle 1965-1990. New York: Penguin Books, 1991. Copyright Blackside, Inc. 1991.
Carson, Clayborne ed. The Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr. New York: Warner Books, 1998.
Hribar, Charon. “Radical Women in the Struggle: A Review of Recent Literature on the Civil Rights and Black Freedom Movements.” Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion, vol. 29, no. 2, 2013, pp. 95–115. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2979/jfemistudreli.29.2.95. Accessed 16 Apr. 2023.
Malcolm X. The Autobiography of Malcolm X. Ballantine Books: New York, 1973.
Malcolm X. Malcolm X Speaks: Selected Speeches and Statements. Ed. George Breitman. Pathfinder Press: New York, 1989.
Malcolm X. Malcolm X: The Last Speeches. Ed. Bruce Perry. Pathfinder Press: New York, 1989.
“Nonviolence.” The Martin Luther King, Jr., Research and Education Institute, Stanford University, 20 Jan. 2022, https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/encyclopedia/nonviolence.
“Nonviolent Philosophy and Self Defense.” Civil Rights History Project, Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/collections/civil-rights-history-project/articles-and-essays/nonviolent-philosophy-and-self-defense/.
Phillips, Mary. “The Power of the First-Person Narrative: Ericka Huggins and the Black Panther Party.” Women’s Studies Quarterly, vol. 43, no. 3/4, 2015, pp. 33–51. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/43958548. Accessed 16 Apr. 2023.
Rickford, Russell. “Black Lives Matter: Toward a Modern Practice of Mass Struggle.” New Labor Forum, vol. 25, no. 1, 2016, pp. 34–42. JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/26419959. Accessed 16 Apr. 2023.
Santoro, Wayne A. “Was the Civil Rights Movement Successful? Tracking and Understanding Black Views.” Sociological Forum, vol. 30, no. S1, 2015, pp. 627–47. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/43654410. Accessed 16 Apr. 2023.
When teaching about the Black Panther Party activists and Malcolm X, it is important to carefully describe their stances on violence. Students may come into the lesson with a preconceived notion that these leaders advocated for violence; instead, these leaders believed in violence only as a last resort and as a method of protection for Black Americans who were victimized by police brutality and structural or direct violence. It may be helpful to emphasize the Black Panther Party’s goal of community empowerment and mutual aid.
Additionally, it is recommended to explore the ways in which the nonviolent civil rights movement and the Black Power movement were interdependent, and how each needed the other to make real, lasting change in American race relations. For instance, nonviolent actions saw more success as a result of a growing fear of violence, created by the Black Power movement.
When reviewing primary sources, the word “Negro” should be contextualized for students. While it appears in several of the primary sources for this lesson, it is now more appropriate for students to use the word “Black” or “African American” to describe a Black American.
Finally, some of the activities incorporate an introduction to and activities around intersectionality. Intersectionality refers to the interconnections between social and demographic categories of identity such as race, gender, and class, and how these different categories can connect to create unique experiences of discrimination and disadvantage. Teaching about intersectionality includes ensuring that students understand and connect with the concepts of identities and understand how social structures impact each individual differently. You can also learn more on teaching and developing this skill further using materials such as Learning for Justice’s Toolkit for “Teaching at the Intersections.”.
Many African American soldiers served in the U.S. military in World War II to fight for freedom and democracy, and then ironically returned home to Jim Crow racism and discrimination. Anger over this injustice spurred the growth of the the civil rights movement, a mass social movement for racial justice and equality for Black Americans. However, not all leaders and groups involved in the civil rights movement agreed on the movement’s goals or strategies. For instance, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and Ella Baker of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) advocated for nonviolence and civil disobedience as the best methods to achieve equality, and aimed to integrate segregated spaces such as public transportation and schools with demonstrations such as marches, boycotts, and sit-ins. On the other hand, activists who believed in “Black Power,” such as Malcolm X of the Nation of Islam and Stokely Carmichael of the Black Panther Party, had a more radical philosophy; they sought to achieve justice “at any means necessary,” and advocated for self-defense and community empowerment to create and uplift self-sufficient Black communities. Regardless of their strategies and specific goals, these two approaches to achieving civil rights ultimately coincided and collaborated–intentionally or not–to make change.
Student Handout:
Select the activities and sources you would like to include in the student view and click “Launch Student View.”
It is highly recommended that you review the Teaching Tips and sources before selecting the activities to best meet the needs and readiness of your students. Activities may utilize resources or primary sources that contain historical expressions of racism, outdated language or racial slurs.
Begin by accessing students’ prior knowledge and conceptions, by having students make a Venn diagram. In one circle, students write “Civil Rights Movement,” in the other, “Black Power.” Students can hen generate word associations around each term. After students have generated lists alone, they will create one as a class. The class should then discuss which terms go in the middle, if any, and why. (Words for which no majority consensus can be reached can be left outside the circles.) Ask students if they see any connections or relationships between any of the terms. Finally, students should write a sentence or two to answer the question: To what extent is Black Power different from the civil rights movement?
Divide the class into two groups. Distribute “Nonviolence: The Only Road to Freedom” by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. to one group, and distribute “Message to the Grassroots” by Malcolm X to the other group. (Note that lengths of readings differ and you may want to select excerpts or have different students read different sections based on your available time). Students should individually read their assigned source, and then discuss the following questions in a small group of students who read the same source:
Then, put students into a mixed group, so that each group has representatives who read Dr. Martin Luther King and also representatives who read Malcolm X. Students should share out from their earlier group to review both sources. Then, each group should discuss the following questions:
“Nonviolence: The Only Road to Freedom,” by Martin Luther King, Jr., 1966
The year 1966 brought with it the first public challenge to the philosophy and strategy of nonviolence from within the ranks of the civil rights movement. Resolutions of self-defense and Black Power sounded forth from our friends and brothers. At the same time riots erupted in several major cities. Inevitably a link was made between the two phenomena though movement leadership continued to deny any implications of violence in the concept of Black Power.
The nation’s press heralded these incidents as an end of the Negro’s reliance on nonviolence as a means of achieving freedom. Articles appeared on “the Plot to Get Whitey.” And, “Must Negroes fight back?” and one had the impression that a serious movement was underway to lead the Negro to freedom through the use of violence.
Indeed, there was much talk of violence. It was the same talk we have heard on the fringes of the nonviolent movement for the past ten years. It was the talk of fearful men, saying that they would not join the nonviolent movement because they would not remain nonviolent if attacked. Now the climate had shifted so that it was even more popular to talk of violence, but in spite of the talk of violence there emerged no action in this direction. One reporter pointed out in a recent New Yorker article, that the fact Beckwith, Price, Rainey, and Collie Leroy Wilkins remain alive is living testimony to the fact that the Negro remains nonviolent. And if this is not enough, a mere check of the statistics of casualties in the recent riots shows that the vast majority of persons killed in riots are Negroes. All the reports of sniping in Los Angeles expressways did not produce a single casualty. The young demented white student at the University of Texas has shown what damage a sniper can do when he is serious. In fact, this one young man killed more people in one day than all the Negroes have killed in all the riots in all the cities since the Harlem riots of 1964. This must raise a serious question about the violent intent of the Negro, for certainly there are many ex-GIs within our ghettos, and no small percentage of those recent migrants from the South have demonstrated some proficiency hunting squirrels and rabbits.
I can only conclude that the Negro, even in his bitterest moments, is not intent on killing white men to be free. This does not mean that the Negro is a saint who abhors violence. Unfortunately, a check of the hospitals in any Negro community on any Saturday night will make you painfully aware of the violence within the Negro community. Hundreds of victims of shooting and cutting lie bleeding in the emergency rooms, but there is seldom ever a white person who is the victim of Negro hostility.
I have talked with many persons in the ghettos of the North who argue eloquently for the use of violence. But I observed none of them in the mobs that rioted in Chicago. I have heard the street-corner preachers in Harlem and in Chicago’s Washington Park, but in spite of the bitterness preached and the hatred espoused, none of them has ever been able to start a riot. So far, only the police through their fears and prejudice have goaded our people to riot. And once the riot starts, only the police or the National Guard have been able to put an end to them, This demonstrates that these violent eruptions are unplanned, uncontrollable temper tantrums brought on by long-neglected poverty, humiliation, oppression and exploitations. Violence as a strategy for social change in America is nonexistent. All the sound and fury seems but the posturing of cowards whose bold talk produces no action and signifies nothing.
I am convinced that for practical as well as moral reasons, nonviolence offers the only road to freedom for my people. In violent warfare, one must be prepared to face ruthlessly the fact that there will be casualties by the thousands. In Vietnam, the United States has evidently decided that it is willing to slaughter millions, sacrifice some two hundred thousand men and twenty billion dollars a year to secure the freedom of some fourteen million Vietnamese. This is to fight a war on Asian soil, where Asians are in the majority. Anyone leading a violent conflict must be willing to make a similar assessment regarding the possible casualties to a minority population confronting a well-armed, wealthy majority with a fanatical right wing that is capable of exterminating the entire black population and which would not hesitate such an attempt if the survival of white Western materialism was at stake.
Arguments that the American Negro is a part of a world which is two-thirds colored and that there will come one day when the oppressed people of color will rise together to throw off the yoke of white oppression are at least fifty years away from being relevant. There is no colored nation, including China, which shows even the potential of leading a revolution of color in any international proportion. Ghana, Zambia, Tanzania, and Nigeria are fighting their own battles for survival against poverty, illiteracy and the subversive influence of neocolonialism, so that they offer no hope to Angola, Southern Rhodesia and South Africa, and much less to the American Negro.
The hard cold facts of racial life in the world today indicate that the hope of the people of color in the world may well rest on the American Negro and his ability to reform the structures of racist imperialism from within and thereby turn the technology and wealth of the West to the task of liberating the world from want.
This is no time for romantic illusions about freedom and empty philosophical debate. This is a time for action. What is needed is a strategy for change, a tactical program which will bring the Negro into the mainstream of American life as quickly as possible. So far, this has only been offered by the nonviolent movement.
Our record of achievement through nonviolent action is already remarkable. The dramatic social changes which have been made across the South are unmatched in the annals of history. Montgomery, Albany, Birmingham and Selma have paved the way for untold progress. Even more remarkable is the fact that this progress occurred with a minimum of human sacrifice and loss of life.
Not a single person has been killed in a nonviolent demonstration. The bombings of the 16th Street Baptist Church occurred several months after demonstrations stopped. Rev. James Reeb, Mrs. Viola Liuzzo and Jimmie Lee Jackson were all murdered at night following demonstrations. And fewer people have been killed in ten years of action across the South than in three nights of rioting in Watts. No similar changes have occurred without infinitely more sufferings, whether it be Gandhi’s drive for independence in India or any African nation’s struggle for independence.
The Question of Self-Defense
There are many people who very honestly raise the question of self-defense. This must be placed in perspective. It goes without saying that people will protect their homes. This is a right guaranteed by the Constitution and respected in the worst areas of the South. But the mere protection of one’s home and person against assault by lawless night riders does not provide any positive approach to the fears and conditions which produce violence. There must be some program for establishing law. Our experience in places like Savannah and Macon, Georgia, has been that a drive which registers Negroes to vote can do more to provide protection of the law and respect for Negroes by even racist sheriffs than anything we have seen.
In a nonviolent demonstration, self-defense must be approached from quite another perspective. One must remember that the cause of the demonstration is some exploitation or form of oppression that has made it necessary for men of courage and good will to demonstrate against evil. For example, a demonstration against the evil of de facto school segregation is based on the awareness that a child’s mind is crippled daily by inadequate educational opportunity. The demonstrator agrees that it is better for him to suffer publicly for a short time to end the crippling evil of school segregation than to have generation after generation of children suffer in ignorance.
In such a demonstration, the point us made that schools are inadequate. This is the evil to which one seeks to point; anything else detracts from that point and interferes with confrontation of the primary evil against which one demonstrates. Of course, no one wants to suffer and be hurt. But it is more important to get at the cause than to be safe. It is better to shed a little blood from a blow on the head or a rock thrown by an angry mob than to have children by the thousands grow up reading at a fifth- or sixth-grade level.
It is always amusing to me when a Negro man says that he can’t demonstrate with us because if someone hit him he would fight back. Here is a man whose children are being plagued by rats and roaches, whose wife is robbed daily at overpriced ghetto food stores, who himself is working for about two-thirds of the pay of a white person doing a similar job and with similar skills, and in spite of all this daily suffering it takes someone spitting on him or calling him a nigger to make him want to fight.
Conditions are such for Negroes in America that all Negroes ought to be fighting aggressively. It is ridiculous for a Negro to raise the question of self-defense in relation to nonviolence as it is for a soldier on the battlefield to say he is not going to take any risks. He is there because he believes that the freedom of his country is worth the risk of his life. The same is true of the nonviolent demonstrator. He sees the misery of his people so clearly that he volunteers to suffer in their behalf and put an end to their plight.
Furthermore, it is extremely dangerous to organize a movement around self-defense. The line between defensive violence and aggressive or retaliatory violence is a fine line indeed. When violence is tolerated even as a means of self-defense there is grave danger that in the fervor of emotion the main fight will be lost over the question of self-defense.
When my home was bombed in 1955 in Montgomery, many men wanted to retaliate, to place an armed guard on my home. But the issue there was not my life, but whether Negroes would achieve first-class treatment on the city’s buses. Had we become distracted by the question of my safety we would have lost the moral offensive and sunk to the level of our oppressors.
I must continue by faith or it is too great a burden to bear and violence, even in self-defense, creates more problems than it solves. Only a refusal to hate or kill can put an end to the chain of violence in the world and lead us toward a community where men can live together without fear. Our goal is to create a beloved community and this will require a qualitative change in our souls as well as a quantitative change in our lives.
Strategy for Change
The American racial revolution has been a revolution to “get in” rather than to overthrow. We want to share in the American economy, the housing market, the educational system and the social opportunities. This goal itself indicates that a social change in America must be nonviolent.
If one is in search of a better job, it does not help to burn down the factory. If one needs more adequate education, shooting the principal will not help, or if housing is the goal, only building and construction will produce that end. To destroy anything, person or property, can’t bring us closer to the goal that we seek.
The nonviolent strategy has been to dramatize the evils of our society in such a ways that pressure is brought to bear against those evils by the forces of good in the community and change is produced.
The student sit-ins of 1960 are a classic illustration of this method. Students were denied the right to eat at a lunch counter, so they deliberately sat down to protest their denial. They were arrested, but this made their parents mad and so they began to close their charge accounts. The students continued to sit in, and this further embarrassed the city, scared away many white shoppers and soon produced an economic threat to the business life of the city. Amid this type of pressure, it is not hard to get people to agree to change.
So far, we have had the Constitution backing most of the demands for change, and this has made out work easier, since we could be sure that the federal courts would usually back up our demonstrations legally. Now we are approaching areas where the voice of the Constitution is not clear. We have left the realm of constitutional rights and we are entering the area of human rights.
The Constitution assured the right to vote, but there is no assurance of the right to adequate housing, or the right to an adequate income. And yet, in a nation which has a gross national product of 750 billion dollars a year, it is morally right to insist that every person has a decent house, an adequate education and enough money to provide basic necessities for one’s family. Achievement of these goals will be a lot more difficult and require much more discipline, understanding, organization and sacrifice.
It so happens that Negroes live in the central city of the major cities of the United States. These cities control the electoral votes of the large states of our nation. This means that though we are only ten percent of the national’s population, we are located in such a key position geographically—the cities of the North and black belts of the South—that we are able to lead a political and moral coalition which can direct the course of the nation. Our position depends upon a lot more than political power, however. It depends upon our ability to marshal moral power as well. As soon as we lose the moral offensive, we are left with only our ten percent of the power of the nation. This is hardly enough to produce any meaningful changes, even within our own communities, for the lines of power control the economy as well and once the flow of money is cut off, progress ceases.
The past three years have demonstrated the power of a committed, morally sound minority to lead the nation. It was the coalition molded through the Birmingham movement which allied the forces of the churches, labor and the academic communities of the nation behind the liberal issues of our time. All of the liberal legislation of the past session of Congress can be credited to this coalition. Even the presence of a vital peace movement and the campus protest against the war in Vietnam can be traced back to the nonviolent action movement lead by the Negro. Prior to Birmingham, our campuses were still in a state of shock over the McCarthy era and Congress was caught in the perennial deadlock of southern Democrats and midwestern Republicans. Negroes put the country on the move against the enemies of poverty, slums and inadequate education.
Techniques of the Future
When Negroes marched, so did the nation. The power of the nonviolent march is indeed a mystery. It is always surprising that a few hundred Negroes marching can produce such a reaction across the nation. When marches are carefully organized around well-defined issues, they represent the power which Victor Hugo phrased as the most powerful force in the world, “an idea whose time has come.” Marching feet announce that time has come for a given idea. When the idea is a sound one, the cause a just one, and the demonstration a righteous one, change will be forthcoming. But if any of these conditions are not present, the power for change is missing also. A thousand people demonstrating for the right to use heroin would have little effect. By the same token, a group of ten thousand marching in anger against a police station and cussing out the chief of police will do very little to bring respect, dignity and unbiased law enforcement. Such a demonstration would only produce fear and bring about an addition of forces to the station and more oppressive methods by the police.
Marches must continue in the future, and they must be the kind of marches that bring about the desired result. But the march is not a “one shot” victory-producing method. One march is seldom successful, and as my good friend Kenneth Clark points out in Dark Ghetto, it can serve merely to let off steam and siphon off the energy which is necessary to produce change. However, when marching is seen as a part of a program to dramatize evil, to mobilize the forces of good will, and to generate pressure and power for change, marches will continue and be effective.
Our experience is that marches must continue over a period of thirty to forty-five days to produce any meaningful results. They must also be sufficient in size to produce some inconvenience to the forces in power or they will go unnoticed. In other words, they must demand the attention of the press, for it is the press which interprets the issue to the community at large and thereby sets in motion the machinery for change.
Along with the march as a weapon for change in our nonviolent arsenal must be listed the boycott. Basic to the philosophy of nonviolence is the refusal to cooperate with evil. There is nothing quite so effective as a refusal to cooperate economically with the forces and institutions which perpetuate evil in our communities.
In the past six months simply by refusing to purchase products from companies which do not hire Negroes in meaningful numbers and in all job categories, the Ministers of Chicago under SCLC’s Operation Breadbasket have increased the income of the Negro community by more than two million dollars annually. In Atlanta the Negroes’ earning power has been increased by more than twenty million dollars annually over the past three years through a carefully disciplined program of selective buying and negotiations by the Negro minister. This is nonviolence at its peak of power, when it cuts into the profit margin of a business in order to bring about a more just distribution of jobs and opportunities for Negro wage earners and consumers.
But again, the boycott must be sustained over a period of several weeks and months to assure results. This means continuous education of the community in order that support can be maintained. People will work together and sacrifice if they understand clearly why and how this sacrifice will bring about change. We can never assume that anyone understands. It is our job to keep people informed and aware.
Our most powerful nonviolent weapon is, as would be expected, also our most demanding, that is organization. To produce change, people must be organized to work together in units of power. These units might be political, as in the case of voters’ leagues and political parties; they may be economic units such as groups of tenants who join forces to form a tenant union or to organize a rent strike; or they may be laboring units of persons who are seeking employment and wage increases.
More and more, the civil rights movement will become engaged in the task of organizing people into permanent groups to protect their own interests and to produce change in their behalf. This is a tedious task which may take years, but the results are more permanent and meaningful.
In the future we will be called upon to organize the unemployed, to unionize the business within the ghetto, to bring tenants together into collective bargaining units and establish cooperatives for purposes of building viable financial institutions within the ghetto that can be controlled by Negroes themselves.
There is no easy way to create a world where men and women can live together, where each has his own job and house and where all children receive as much education as their minds can absorb. But if such a world is created in our lifetime, it will be done in the United States by Negroes and white people of good will. It will be accomplished by persons who have the courage to put an end to suffering by willingly suffering themselves rather than inflict suffering upon others. It will be done by rejecting the racism, materialism and violence that has characterized Western civilization and especially by working toward a world of brotherhood, cooperation and peace.
Source: King Jr., Martin Luther. I Have a Dream: Writings and Speeches that Changed the World. Ed. James Melvin Washington. San Francisco: Harper San Francisco, 1986.
Document 5.21.8
In 1963, the Korean War had been over for a decade and World War II nearly twice that. In September of that year, four black girls had been killed by a bomb planted outside a church in Birmingham as white extremists continued to oppose equality for blacks. Police used violence to disrupt civil rights demonstrations. As Minister of Faith for the Nation of Islam, Malcolm X spoke throughout the cities and universities of the North.
Excerpts from “Message to the Grass Roots,” speech by Malcolm X in Detroit, November 10, 1963
As long as the white man sent you to Korea, you bled. He sent you to Germany, you bled. He sent you to the South Pacific to fight the Japanese, you bled. You bleed for white people, but when it comes to seeing your own churches being bombed and little black girls murdered, you haven’t got any blood. You bleed when the white man says bleed; you bite when the white man says bite; and you bark when the white man says bark. I hate to say this about us, but it’s true. How are you going to be nonviolent in Mississippi, as violent as you were in Korea? How can you justify being nonviolent in Mississippi and Alabama, when your churches are being bombed, and your little girls are being murdered, and at the same time you are going to get violent with Hitler, and Tojo, and somebody else you don’t even know?
If violence is wrong in America, violence is wrong abroad. If it is wrong to be violent defending black women and black children and black babies and black men, then it is wrong for America to draft us, and make us violent abroad in defense of her. And if it is right for America to draft us, and teach us how to be violent in defense of her, then it is right for you and me to do whatever is necessary to defend our own people right here in this country….
So I cite these various revolutions [American, French, Russian, and Chinese], brothers and sisters, to show you that you don’t have a peaceful revolution. You don’t have a turn-the-other-cheek revolution. There’s no such thing as a nonviolent revolution. The only kind of revolution that is nonviolent is the Negro revolution. The only revolution in which the goal is loving your enemy is the Negro revolution. It is the only revolution in which the goal is a desegregated lunch counter, a desegregated theater, a desegregated park, and a desegregated public toilet; you can sit down next to white folks---on the toilet. That’s no revolution. Revolution is based on land. Land is the basis of all independence. Land is the basis of freedom, justice, and equality….
Revolution is bloody, revolution is hostile, revolution knows no compromise, revolution overturns and destroys everything that gets in its way. And you, sitting around here like a knot on the wall, saying, “I’m going to love these folks no matter how much they hate me.” No, you need a revolution. Whoever heard of a revolution where they lock arms, as Rev. Cleage was pointing out beautifully, singing “We Shall Overcome?” You don’t do that in a revolution. You don’t do any singing, you’re too busy swinging. It’s based on land. A revolutionary wants land so he can set up his own nation, an independent nation. These Negroes aren’t asking for any nation—they’re trying to crawl back on the plantation.
When you want a nation, that’s called nationalism…. If you’re afraid of black nationalism, you’re afraid of revolution. And if you love black revolution, you love black nationalism….
There is nothing in our book, the Koran, that teaches us to suffer peacefully. Our religion teaches us to be intelligent. Be peaceful, be courteous, obey the law, respect everyone; but if someone puts his hand on you, send him to the cemetery. That’s a good religion.
Source: Malcolm X Speaks: Selected Speeches and Statements, ed. George Breitman, New York: Pathfinder Press, 1989. 7-10, 12.
Document 5.21.1
To help students understand the program and philosophy of Black Power, hand out “What We Want” by Stokely Carmichael. Students read the essay silently. Then instruct the students to set up and number six vertical columns on a piece of paper. Working in groups of four (a reporter, a recorder, a group facilitator, and a person to ask questions from the group), students summarize the six parts of the essay that follow the introduction, one per column. Students should include one quote per section. Also, for each section, the students should write the values or beliefs of Black Power implicit or explicit in that section. After about 15 minutes, the teacher reviews the sections aloud with the students and generates a summary for each section on the board. Once the class has agreed on the summary, prompt them to come to consensus on the values expressed in each section. The class should then discuss the questions:
Document 5.21.5: “What We Want” by Stokely Carmichael
Carmichael was chairman of SNCC when he coined the term “Black Power.” As chairman, he appeared at many universities to recruit members or spread his ideas.
One of the tragedies of the struggle against racism is that up to now there has been no national organization which could speak to the growing militancy of young black people in the urban ghetto. There has been only a civil rights movement, whose tone of voice was adapted to an audience of liberal whites. It served as a sort of buffer zone between them and angry young blacks. None of its so-called leaders could go into a rioting community and be listened to. In a sense, I blame ourselves---together with the mass media---for what has happened in Watts, Harlem, Chicago, Cleveland, Omaha. Each time the people in those cities saw Martin Luther King get slapped, they became angry; when they saw four little black girls bombed to death, they were angrier; and when nothing happened, they were steaming. We had nothing to offer that they could see, except to go out and be beaten again. We helped to build the frustration.
________
An organization which claims to be working for the needs of the community---as SNCC does---must work to provide that community with a position of strength from which to make its voice heard. This is the significance of black power beyond the slogan.
Black power can be clearly defined for those who do not attach the fears of white America to their questions about it. We should begin with the basic fact that black Americans have two basic problems: they are poor and they are black. All other problems arise from this two-sided reality: lack of education, the so-called apathy of black men. Any program to end racism must address itself to that double reality.
________
The concept of “black power” is not a recent or isolated phenomenon: It has grown out of the ferment of agitation and activity by different people and organizations in many black communities over the years. Our last year of work in Alabama added a new concrete possibility. In Lowndes County, black power will mean that if a Negro is elected sheriff, he can end police brutality. If a black man is elected tax assessor, he can collect and channel funds for the building of better roads and schools serving black people---thus advancing the move from political power into the economic arena. In such areas as Lowndes, where black men have a majority, they will attempt to use it to exercise control. This is what they seek: control. Where Negroes lack a majority, black power means proper representation and sharing of control. It means the creation of power bases from which black people can work to change statewide or nationwide patterns of oppression through pressure from strength---instead of weakness. Politically, black power means what it has always meant to SNCC: the coming together of black people to elect representatives and to force those representatives to speak to their needs. It does not mean merely putting black faces into office. A man or woman who is black and from the slums cannot be automatically expected to speak to the needs of black people. Most of the black politicians we see around the country today are not what SNCC means by black power. The power must be that of a community, and emanate from there.
________
Ultimately, the economic foundations of this country must be shaken if black people are to control their lives. The colonies of the United States---and this includes the black ghettoes within its borders, north and south---must be liberated. For a century this nation has been like an octopus of exploitation, its tentacles stretching from Mississippi and Harlem to South America, the Middle East, southern Africa, and Vietnam; the form of exploitation varies from area to area but the essential result has been the same---a powerful few have maintained and enriched at the expense of the poor and voiceless colored masses. This pattern must be broken. As its grip loosens here and there around the world, the hopes of black Americans become more realistic. For racism to die, a totally different America must be born.
________
White America will not face the problem of color, the reality of it. The well-intended say: “We’re all human, everybody is really decent, we must forget color.” But color cannot be “forgotten” until its weight is recognized and dealt with. White America will not acknowledge the ways in which this country sees itself are contradicted by being black---and always have been. Whereas most of the people who settled this country came here for freedom or for economic opportunity, blacks were brought here to be slaves. When the Lowndes County Freedom Organization chose the black panther as its symbol, it was christened by the press as the “Black Panther Party”---but the Alabama Democratic Party, whose symbol is a rooster, has never been called the White Cock Party. No one ever talked about “white power” because power in this country is white. All this adds up to more than merely identifying a group phenomenon by some catchy name or adjective. The furor over that black panther reveals the problems that white America has with color and sex; the furor over “black power” reveals how deep racism runs and the great fear which is attached to it.
________
I have said that most white liberals react to “black power” with the question, What about me?, rather than saying: Tell me what you want me to do and I’ll see if I can do it. There are answers to the right question. One of the most disturbing things about almost all white supporters of the movement has been that they are afraid to go into their own communities – which is where the racism exists---and work to get rid of it. They want to run from Berkeley to tell us what to do in Mississippi; let them look instead at Berkeley. They admonish blacks to be nonviolent; let them preach nonviolence in the white community. They come to teach me Negro history; let them go to the suburbs and open up freedom schools for whites. Let them work to stop America’s racist foreign policy; let them press this government to cease supporting the economy of South Africa.
There is a vital job to be done among poor whites. We hope to see eventually a coalition between poor blacks and poor whites. That is the only coalition which seems acceptable to us, and we see such a coalition as the major internal instrument of change in American society. SNCC has tried several times to organize poor whites; we are trying to again now, with an initial training program in Tennessee. It is purely academic today to talk about bringing poor blacks and whites together, but the job of creating a poor-white power bloc must be attempted. The main responsibility for it falls upon the whites.
________
But our mission is not merely of a society where all black men have enough to buy the good things of life. When we urge that black money go into black pockets, we mean the communal pocket. We want to see money go back into the community and used to benefit it. We want to see the cooperative concept applied in business and banking. We want to see black ghetto residents demand that an exploiting store keeper sell them, at minimal cost, a building or a shop that they will own and improve cooperatively; they can back their demand with a rent strike, or a boycott, and a community so unified behind them that no one else will move into the building or buy at the store. The society we seek to build among black people, then, is not a capitalist one. It is a society in which the spirit of community and humanistic love prevail.
Source: From “What We Want,” by Stokely Carmichael in The New York Review of Books (September 22, 1966). Copyright 1966 NYREV, Inc. From The Eyes on the Prize Civil Rights Reader: Documents, Speeches, and Firsthand Accounts from the Black Freedom Struggle, 1965-1990. New York: Penguin Books, 1991. Copyright Blackside, Inc. 1991.
Document #5
“Black Power: A Voice Within”
Ruth Turner Perot, special asst. to national director of CORE
1967
…Black power to CORE means the organization of the black community into a tight and disciplined group, for six purposes:
Let me give some examples of how CORE programs the concept:
We believe that these building blocks will become a bulwark that will protect the next Adam Clayton Powell, multiplied many times over. There is no other choice. If power for the powerless is not achieved so that changes within its structure can be made, this nation will not survive.
Document 5*: “Black Power: A Voice Within.” From “Black Power: A Voice Within,” by Ruth Turner Perot in Oberlin Alumni Magazine LXIII (May 1967). From The Eyes on the Prize Civil Rights Reader: Documents, Speeches, and Firsthand Accounts from the Black Freedom Struggle, 1965-1990. New York: Penguin Books, 1991. Copyright Blackside, Inc. 1991.
After reading several primary sources about Black Power, the class—first individually, then as a group—should generate a list of the top three values of the Black Power movement. Hand out an excerpt from “Black Power: A Voice Within” by Ruth Turner Perot to students. Students read the essay individually. Students then work in groups to create a pamphlet or poster for a simulated town meeting. The goal is to persuade people that attending the meeting will make a tangible impact on the current standard of living for African Americans. They should include answers to the following questions:
Ruth Turner Perot was a special assistant to the national director of CORE in 1967.
Black power to CORE means the organization of the black community into a tight and disciplined group, for six purposes:
Let me give some examples of how CORE programs the concept:
We believe that these building blocks will become a bulwark that will protect the next Adam Clayton Powell, multiplied many times over. There is no other choice. If power for the powerless is not achieved so that changes within its structure can be made, this nation will not survive.
Source: “Black Power: A Voice Within.” From “Black Power: A Voice Within,” by Ruth Turner Perot in Oberlin Alumni Magazine LXIII (May 1967). From The Eyes on the Prize Civil Rights Reader: Documents, Speeches, and Firsthand Accounts from the Black Freedom Struggle, 1965-1990. New York: Penguin Books, 1991. Copyright Blackside, Inc. 1991.
Document 5.21.6
Instruct students to research the term intersectionality and then define it, first individually and then as a class. Tell them that they will now examine an intersectional critique of the leadership of the civil rights movement from the perspective of a Black woman. Read Ella Baker’s comments on radical thinking aloud to the class. As a full group, discuss the following questions:
Then distribute the Interview with Ella Baker and have students read it independently. Have students write a letter to a newspaper to amplify Baker’s views. The letter should include:
Have students share their letters with the class or in small groups. Discuss to what extent the civil rights movement was an intersectional social movement.
As the civil rights movement began to move in different directions in the late 1960s, radical became synonymous with revolutionary, both as an adjective and a noun. (Radical is from the Late Latin word for “root.”) Baker was already in her mid-60s when she gave this opinion, used as an epigraph to the Introduction in Barbara Ransby, Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision (UNC Press: Chapel Hill, 2003).
In order for us as poor and oppressed people to become a part of society that is meaningful, the system under which we now exist has to be radically changed. This means that we are going to have to learn to think in radical terms. I use the term radical in its original meaning---getting down to and understanding the root cause. It means facing a system that does not lend itself to your needs and devising means by which you change that system.
From ELLA BAKER AND THE BLACK FREEDOM MOVEMENT: A RADICAL DEMOCRATIC VISION by Barbara Ransby. Copyright © 2003 by the University of North Carolina Press. Used by permission of the publisher. www.uncpress.org
Document 5.21.10
Gerda Lerner, professor of history at the University of Wisconsin, interviewed Ella Baker while researching her book Black Women in White America, published in 1972 (Pantheon Books: New York, pages 346-52.) The following text is an excerpt from the transcript of that interview with Baker.
In my organizational work, I have never thought in terms of my “making a contribution.” I just thought of myself as functioning where there was a need. And if I have made a contribution I think it may be that I had some influence on a large number of people.
As assistant field secretary of the branches of the NAACP, much of my work was in the South. At that time [1940s] the NAACP was the leader on the cutting edge of social change. I remember when NAACP membership in the South was the basis for getting beaten up or even killed.
I used to leave New York about the 15th of February and travel through the South for four to five months. I would go to, say, Birmingham, Alabama and help organize membership campaigns. And in the process of helping to organize membership campaigns, there was the opportunity for developing community reactions. You would go into areas where people were not yet organized in the NAACP and try to get them more involved. Maybe you would start with some simple thing like the fact that they had no street lights, or the fact that in the given area somebody had been arrested or had been jailed in a manner that was considered illegal and unfair, and the like. You would deal with whatever the local problem was, and on the basis of the needs of the people you would try to organize them in the NAACP. . .
My basic sense of it has always been to get people to understand that in the long run they themselves are the only protection they have against violence or injustice. If they had only ten members in the NAACP at a given point, those ten members could be in touch with twenty-five members in the next little town, with fifty in the next and throughout the state as a result of the organization of state conferences, and they, of course, could be linked up with the national. People have to be made to understand that they cannot look for salvation anywhere but to themselves. . . .
[Baker left the NAACP but continued to volunteer with the organization throughout the fifties in New York City while working as an activist within the community. After the 1954 Supreme Court order to desegregate schools, Baker was selected for the Mayor’s Commission on School Integration.]
I’ve never believed that people who control things really were willing and able to pay the price of integration. From a practical standpoint, anyone who looked at the Harlem area knew that the potential for integration per se was basically impossible unless there were some radically innovative things done. And those innovative things would not be acceptable to those who ran the school system, nor to communities, nor even to the people who call themselves supporters of integration. I did a good deal of speaking, and I went to Queens, I went to the upper West side, and the people very eagerly said they wanted school integration. But when you raised the question of whether they would permit or would welcome Blacks to live in the same houses with them, which was the only practical way at that stage to achieve integration, they squirmed. Integration certainly had to be pushed concurrently with changing the quality of education that the black children were getting, and changing the attitudes of the educational establishment toward the black community.
I don’t think we achieved too much with the committee except to pinpoint certain issues and to have survived some very sharp confrontations with the Superintendent and others on the Board of Education. But out of it came increased fervor on the part of the black communities to make some changes. One of the gratifying things to me is the fact that even as late as this year I have met people who were in that group and who have been continuously active in the struggle for quality education in the black communities ever since.
There certainly has been progress in the direction of the capacity of people to face this issue. And to me, when people themselves know what they are looking for and recognize that they can exercise some influence by action, that’s progress.
Come 1957, I went down South a couple of times in connection with the formation of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference…. I stayed with the SCLC for two and a half years, because they didn’t have anybody. My official capacity was varied. When I first went down [to set up the Atlanta office], I didn’t insist on a title, which is nothing new or unusual for me; it didn’t bother me. I was just there in person. And then they were looking for a minister, a man, and I helped to find a minister and a man, and he stayed a while, and when he came I decided that since I was doing what I was doing, he was the director and I became, I think, co-director. And then there was nobody, and of course there was no money in those days, so I kept on until the summer of 1960. And prior to that, of course, the sit-ins had started, and I was able to get the SCLC to at least sponsor the conference in Raleigh. We had hoped to call together about 100 or 125 of the young leaders who had emerged in the sit-ins in the South. But of course the sit-ins had been so dynamic in the field that when we got to the meeting we had two hundred and some people, including some from the North. And out of that conference of the Easter weekend of 1960, which I coordinated and organized, we had a committee that came out of it, and out of that committee SNCC was born.
And after SNCC came into existence, of course, it opened up a new era of struggle. I felt the urge to stay close by. Because if I had done anything anywhere, it had been largely in the role of supporting things, and in the background of things that needed to be done for the organizations that were supposedly out front. So I felt it I had done it for the elders, I could do it for the young people. . . .
[Baker’s relationship to SNCC was purely voluntary, so she supported herself by taking a variety of positions with community organizations in Atlanta before moving back to New York after the 1964 elections.]
There are those, some of the young people especially, who have said to me that if I had not been a woman I would have been well known in certain places, and perhaps held certain kinds of positions.
I have always felt it was a handicap for oppressed peoples to depend so largely upon a leader, because unfortunately in our culture, the charismatic leader usually becomes a leader because he has found a spot in the public limelight. It usually means he has been touted through the public media, which means that the media made him and the media may undo him. There is also the danger in our culture that, because a person is called upon to give public statements and is acclaimed by the establishment, such a person gets to the point of believing that he is the movement. Such people get so involved with playing the game of being important that they exhaust themselves and their time, and they don’t do the work of actually organizing people.
For myself, circumstances frequently dictated what had to be done as I saw it. For example, I had no plans to go down and set up the office of SCLC. But it seemed unless something were done whatever impetus had been gained would be lost, and nobody else was available who was willing or able to do it. So I went because to me it was more important what was a potential for all of us than it was to do what I might have done for myself. I knew from the beginning that as a woman, an older woman, in a group of ministers who are accustomed to having women largely as supporters, there was no place for me to have come into a leadership role. The competition wasn’t worth it.
The movement of the ‘50’s and ‘60’s was carried largely by women, since it came out of church support groups. It was sort of second nature to women to play a supportive role. How many made a conscious decision on the basis of the larger goals, how many on the basis of habit pattern, I don’t know. But it’s true that the numbers of women who carried the movement is much larger than that of men. Black women have had to carry this role, and I think the younger women are insisting on equal footing.
I don’t advocate anybody following the pattern I followed, unless they find themselves in a situation where they think that the larger goals will be shortchanged if they don’t. From the standpoint of the historical pattern of society, which seems to assume that this is the best role for women, I think that certainly the young people who are challenging this ought to be challenging it, and it ought to be changed. But I also think you have to have a certain sense of your own value, and a sense of security on your part, to be able to forgo the glamor of what the leadership role offers. From the standpoint of my work and my own self-concepts, I don’t think I have thought of myself largely as a woman. I thought of myself as an individual with a certain amount of sense of the need to participate in the movement. I have always thought what is needed is the development of people who are interested not in being leaders as much as in developing leadership among other people. Every time I see a young person who has come through the system to a stage where he could profit from the system and identify with it, but who identifies more with the struggle of black people who have not had his chance, every time I find such a person I take a new hope. I feel a new life as a result of it.
Source: Jonathan Birnbaum and Clarence Taylor, ed., Civil Rights Since 1787: A Reader on the Black Struggle. New York: New York University Press, 2000, pp. 467-71. Document 5.21.9
Instruct students to independently read “The Importance of Vietnam” by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., which draws connections between the civil rights movement and the Vietnam War. Explain that this was one of Dr. King’s most controversial speeches. After they read, students should write down their main takeaway from the document and create three discussion questions they want to ask the full class during a Socratic seminar.
After the seminar, lead a reflection in which students answer the following questions:
Dr. King delivered what was considered his most controversial speech on the Vietnam War at a meeting of Clergy and Laity Concerned in New York City. He spoke on April 4, exactly one year before he was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee.
Excerpts from “The Importance of Vietnam,” by Martin Luther King, Jr., 1967.
Since I am a preacher by trade, I suppose it is not surprising that I have seven major reasons for bringing Vietnam into the field of my moral vision. There is at the outset a very obvious and almost facile connection between the war in Vietnam and the struggle I, and others, have been waging in America. A few years ago there was a shining moment in that struggle. It seemed as if there was a real promise of hope for the poor---both black and white—through the poverty program. There were experiments, hopes, new beginnings. Then came the buildup of Vietnam and I watched the program broken and eviscerated as if it were some idle political plaything of a society gone mad on war, and I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic destructive suction tube. So I was increasingly compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor and attack it as such.
Perhaps the more tragic recognition of reality took place when it became clear to me that the war was doing far more than devastating the hopes of the poor at home. It was sending their sons and their brothers and their husbands to fight and to die in extraordinarily high proportions relative to the rest of the population. We were taking the black young men who had been crippled by our society and sending them eight thousand miles away to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in southwest Georgia and East Harlem. So we have been repeatedly faced with the cruel irony of watching Negro and white boys on TV screens as they kill and die together for a nation that has been unable to seat them together in the same schools. So we watch them in brutal solidarity burning the huts of a poor village, but we realize that they would never live on the same block in Detroit. I could not be silent in the face of such cruel manipulation of the poor.
My third reason moves to an even deeper level of awareness, for it grows out of my experience in the ghettos of the North over the last three years—especially the last three summers. As I have walked among the desperate, rejected and angry young men I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through nonviolent action. But they asked---and rightly so—what about Vietnam? They asked if our own nation wasn’t using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today— my own government. For the sake of those boys, for the sake of this government, for the sake of hundreds of thousands trembling under our violence, I cannot be silent.
For those who ask the question, “Aren’t you a civil rights leader?” and thereby mean to exclude me from the movement for peace, I have this further answer. In 1957 when a group of us formed the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, we chose as our motto: “To save the soul of America.” We were convinced that we could not limit our vision to certain rights for black people, but instead affirmed the conviction that Amercia would never be free or saved from itself unless the descendants of its slaves were loosed completely from the shackles they still wear. In a way we were agreeing with Langston Hughes, that black bird of Harlem, who had written earlier:
O, yes,
I say it plain,
America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath—
America will be!
Now, it should be incandescently clear that no one who has any concern for the integrity and life of America today can ignore the present war. If America’s soul becomes totally poisoned, part of the autopsy must read Vietnam. It can never be saved so long as it destroys the deepest hopes of men the world over. So it is that those of us who are yet determined that America will be are led down the path of protest and dissent, working for the health of our land.
As if the weight of such a commitment to the life and health of America were not enough, another burden of responsibility was placed upon me in 1964; and I cannot forget that the Nobel Prize for Peace was also a commission—a commission to work harder than I had ever worked before “the brotherhood of man.” This is a calling that takes me beyond national allegiances, but even if it were not present I would yet have to live with the meaning of my commitment to the ministry of Jesus Christ. To me the relationship of this ministry to the making of peace is so obvious that I sometimes marvel at those who ask me why I am speaking against the war. Could it be that they do not know that the good news was meant for all men—for Communist and capitalist, for their children and ours, for black and for white, for revolutionary and conservative? Have they forgotten that my ministry is in obedience to the one who loved his enemies so fully that he died for them? What then can I say to the “Vietcong” or to Castro or to Mao as a faithful minister of this one? Can I threaten them with death or must I not share with them my life?
Finally, as I try to delineate for you and for myself the road that leads from Montgomery to this place I would have offered all that was most valid if I simply said that I must be true to my conviction that I share with all men the calling to be a son of the living God. Beyond the calling of race or nation or creed is this vocation of sonship and brotherhood, and because I believe that the Father is deeply concerned especially for his suffering and helpless and outcast children, I come tonight to speak for them.
This I believe to be the privilege and the burden of all of us who deem ourselves bound by allegiances and loyalties which are broader and deeper than nationalism and which go beyond our nation’s self-defined goals and positions. We are called to speak for the weak, for the voiceless, for victims of our nation and for those it calls enemy. For no document from human hands can make these humans any less our brothers….
Protesting the War
Meanwhile we in the churches and synagogues have a continuing task while we urge our government to disengage itself from a disgraceful commitment. We must continue to raise our voices if our nation persists in its perverse ways in Vietnam. We must be prepared to match actions with words by seeking out every creative means of protest possible.
As we counsel young men concerning military service we must clarify for them our nation’s role in Vietnam and challenge them with the alternative conscientious objection. I am pleased to say that this is the path now being chosen by more than seventy students at my own alma mater, Morehouse College, and I recommend it to all who find the American course in Vietnam a dishonorable and unjust one. Moreover I would encourage all ministers of draft age to give up their ministerial exemptions and seek status as conscientious objectors. These are the times for real choices and not false ones. We are at the moment when our lives must be placed on the line if our nation is to survive its own folly. Every man of humane convictions must decide on the protest that best suits his convictions, but we must all protest.
There is something seductively tempting about stopping there and sending us all off on what in some circles has become a popular crusade against the war in Vietnam. I say we must enter the struggle, but I wish to go on now to say something even more disturbing. The war in Vietnam is but a symptom of a far deeper malady within the American spirit, and if we ignore this sobering reality we will find ourselves organizing clergy- and laymen-concerned committees for the next generation. They will be concerned about Guatemala and Peru. They will be concerned about Thailand and Cambodia. They will be concerned about Mozambique and South Africa. We will be marching for these and a dozen other names and attending rallies without end unless there is a significant and profound change in American life and policy. Such thoughts take us beyond Vietnam, but not beyond our calling as sons of the living God.
In 1957 a sensitive American official overseas said that it seemed to him that our nation was on the wrong side of a world revolution. During the past ten years we have seen emerge a pattern of suppression which now has justified the presence of U.S. military “advisors” in Venezuela. This need to maintain social stability for our investments accounts for the counter-revolutionary action of American forces in Guatemala. It tells why American helicopters are being used against guerrillas in Colombia and why American napalm and green beret forces have already been active against rebels in Peru. It is with such activity in mind that the words of the late John F. Kennedy come back to haunt us. Five years ago he said, “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.”
Increasingly, by choice or by accident, this is the role our nation has taken—the role of those who make peaceful revolution impossible by refusing to give up the privileges and the pleasures that come from the immense profits of overseas investment.
I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a “thing-oriented” society to a “person-oriented” society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.
A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies. On the one hand we are called to play the good Samaritan on life’s roadside; but that will only be an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life’s highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it is not haphazard and superficial. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring. A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation, it will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say: “This is not just.” It will look at our alliance with the landed gentry of Latin America and say: “This is not just.” The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just. A true revolution of values will lay hands on the world order and say of war: “This way of settling differences is not just.” This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation’s homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into veins of people normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.
American, the richest and most powerful nation in the world, can well lead the way in this revolution of values. There is nothing, except a tragic death wish, to prevent us from reordering our priorities, so that the pursuit of peace will take precedence over the pursuit of war. There is nothing to keep us from molding a recalcitrant status quo with bruised hands until we have fashioned it into a brotherhood. . . .
Source: King Jr., Martin Luther. I Have a Dream: Writings and Speeches that Changed the World. Ed. James Melvin Washington. San Francisco: Harper San Francisco, 1986.
Document 5.21.7
Students will work in partners to make a “family tree” of the civil rights movement. (Trees can be posters, web pages, etc.) The tree should include pictures of Baker, Carmichael, King, Malcolm X, and other civil rights leaders. It should also include organizations: NAACP, SNCC, SCLC, Nation of Islam, Black Panthers, and CORE. The students diagram the relationships, such as brother, cousin, mother, aunt, etc., then present their trees to the class and justify the relationships they chose to use among the leaders and organizations.
Each student should also answer the questions:
How did the variety of approaches and ideas within the civil rights movement help it succeed? Hinder its success? Has it succeeded?
Boycotts, marches, and sit-ins defined the nonviolent strategy of the civil rights movement. People often sang as they marched. They sang as they waited for speakers to begin. “We Shall Overcome” became the theme song. African Americans also continued the African tradition of improvisation in music. The lyrics in “Oh Freedom” were altered to include lines such as, “No segregation, over me,” “No more dogs biting me,” “Nothing but freedom over me,” and “No more shooting over me.” In “Come Bah Yah” they sang “We need freedom, Lord. . . We need justice, Lord.” Have students listen to these songs or other songs from the civil rights movement such as “Get on Board Children” and write down a lyric from each one. You may also opt to use the Lyric Analysis worksheet.
Discuss the following questions:
Break students into pairs. Assign each pair a leader of the civil rights movement below, each of whom identified as a woman or a transgender woman. Students independently research and then create a poster about their woman that answers the following questions. Students then share their posters through a gallery walk.
Leaders:
Conclude with a full class discussion about the role of gender in the civil rights movement, using the following questions:
Instruct students to work in small groups to research the ways in which the civil rights movement intersected with other social and protest movements of the 1960s. Assign each group one of the following social movements:
Students should produce a pamphlet that aims to convince readers that an intersectional analysis is essential for a social movement’s success, and that answers the following questions. Pamphlets should reference at least three primary sources and at least two secondary sources by historians.
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