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Mockingbirds don't do one thing but make music for us to enjoy.
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Mockingbirds don't do one thing but make music for us to enjoy • "High above us in the darkness a solitary mocker poured out his repertoire in blissful unawareness of whose tree he sat in, plunging from the shrill kee, kee of the sunflower bird to the irascible qua-ack of a bluejay, to the sad lament of Poor Will, Poor Will, Poor Will."
LIFE AFTER THE CIVIL WAR • The years after the Civil War proved to be a difficult time for the African-American population of America. • Congress knew that Southern states would not readily grant freed men the full rights of citizenship that the rest of the population enjoyed. • Therefore, they passed the Civil Rights Act of 1876. Section 1 of that act states that, "all persons...shall be entitled to the full and equal enjoyment of the accommodations, advantages, facilities, and privileges of inns...theaters. and other places...applicable alike to citizens of every race and color..."
Most Southern states began to pass laws called Jim Crow Laws, providing a legal basis for segregation. • The Jim Crow laws applied to all Negroes-not merely the rowdy, or drunken, or surly, or ignorant ones. The new laws did not countenance the old conservative tendency to distinguish between classes of the race, to encourage the 'better' element, and to draw it into a white alliance. • Those laws backed up the Alabamian who told the disfranchising convention of his state that no Negro in the world was the equal of 'the least, poorest, lowest-down white man I ever knew'...The Jim Crow law put the authority of the state or city in the voice of the streetcar conductor, the railway brakeman, the bus driver, the theater usher, and also in the voice of the hoodlums of the public parks and playgrounds. They gave free reign and the majority of the law to mass aggressions that might otherwise have been curbed, blunted, or deflected. • Quote from Historian, C. Vann Woodward
The Plessy v. Ferguson This decision is also known as the case allowing the separate-but-equal laws. The decision was handed down on May 18, 1886 by Mr. Justice Brown. In an excerpt he stated that, "Laws permitting, and even requiring, their separation in places where they are liable to be brought into contact do not necessarily imply the inferiority of either race to the other...universally, recognized as within the competency of the state legislators in the exercise of their police power."
Segregation • According to the Supreme Court, segregation was legal as long as the facilities for the different races were separate but equal. However, the majority of the facilities for blacks were not equal.
Separate but Equal? • Laws in the South separating African American and white residents proliferated during the 1880s. The 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson Supreme Court case created a national yardstick for these statutes. • Under this ruling, facilities provided for African Americans were to be separate from but equal to those furnished for whites.
In reality, African American facilities were rarely comparable. • The Jim Crow system dominated Southern society by creating separate hotels, restaurants, theaters, barbershops, schools, and playgrounds for blacks. • Trains, buses, and streetcars also segregated their passengers by race.
Segregation ordinances adopted by some cities even demanded separate water fountains and restrooms in public places. • Jim Crow statues relegated blacks by law to second-class citizenship. • The Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and '60s led to the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which outlawed discrimination and segregation in voting, education, and the use of public facilities.
The case of the Scottish Boys arose in Scottsboro, Alabama during the 1930s, when nine black youths ranging in age from thirteen to nineteen, were accused of raping two white women, one of whom would later recant. • The trials (during the Great Depression time), in which the boys were convicted and sentenced to death by all-white juries despite the weak and contradictory testimonies of the witnesses, are regarded as one of the greatest travesties of the United States justice system.
Upon the allegations of the two women, a lynch mob gathered around the jail, prepared to storm and kill the youths. Given the situation, the governor of Alabama, Benjamin Miller, was forced to call in the National Guard to protect the jail. • Authorities pleaded against mob violence by promising speedy trials and executions. On March 30, the so-called Scottsboro Boys were indicted by a Grand Jury. • In April, all were convicted and sentenced to death, except for one thirteen year old boy, who was sentenced to life in prison.
The death sentences, originally scheduled to be carried out quickly, were postponed pending appeals that took the case all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, where the sentences were overturned. • Despite the fact that one of the women later denied being raped, the retrials resulted in convictions. • All of the defendants were eventually acquitted, paroled, or pardoned (besides one who simply escaped), some after serving years in prison. • The Scottsboro case later inspired Harper Lee's famous work, To Kill a Mockingbird.
Trials and retrials continued for years. • Twice the U. S. Supreme Court would, in landmark decisions, set aside the convictions of "Scottsboro Boys." • Not until 1950 would the last innocent black find his way out of the Alabama prison system.
No crime in American history-- let alone a crime that never occurred-- produced as many trials, convictions, reversals, and retrials as did an alleged gang rape of two white girls by nine black teenagers on a Southern Railroad freight run on March 25, 1931. • The struggle for justice of the "Scottsboro Boys," as the black teens were called, made celebrities out of anonymities, launched and ended careers, wasted lives, produced heroes, opened southern juries to blacks, exacerbated sectional strife, and divided America's political left.
Trials of the Scottsboro Boys began twelve days after their arrest in the courtroom of Judge A. E. Hawkins. • Haywood Patterson described the scene as "one big smiling white face." • Many local newspapers had made their conclusions about the defendants before the trials began. • One headline read: "ALL NEGROES POSITIVELY IDENTIFIED BY GIRLS AND ONE WHITE BOY WHO WAS HELD PRISONER WITH PISTOL AND KNIVES WHILE NINE BLACK FIENDS COMMITTED REVOLTING CRIME." • Representing the Boys in their uphill legal battle were Stephen Roddy and Milo Moody. Roddy was an unpaid and unprepared Chattanooga real estate attorney who, on the first day of trial, was "so stewed he could hardly walk straight." • Moody was a forgetful seventy-year old local attorney who hadn't tried a case in decades.
In January, 1932, the Alabama Supreme Court, by a 6 - 1 vote, affirmed all but one of the eight convictions and death sentences. (The court ruled that Eugene Williams, age thirteen, should have not been tried as an adult.) • The cases were appealed to the United States Supreme Court which overturned the convictions in the landmark case of Powell vsAlabama. • The Court, 7 - 2, ruled that the right of the defendants under the Fourteenth Amendment's due process clause to competent legal counsel had been denied by Alabama.
The Scottsboro Boys spent the two years between their first trials and the second round, scheduled to begin in March, 1933 in Decatur, in the deplorable conditions of Depression-era Alabama prisons. • While on death row at Kilby prison, on the very date originally set for their own executions, they watched as another inmate was carried off to unsoundproofed death chamber adjacent to their cells, then listened to the sounds of his electrocution. • Once or twice a week they were allowed to leave their tiny cells, as they were handcuffed and walked a few yards down the hall to a shower. • An early visitor found them "terrified, bewildered" like "scared little mice, caught in a trap."
As their trial date approached, they were moved to the Decatur jail, a rat-infested facility that two years earlier had been condemned as "unfit for white prisoners."
The story of the Scottsboro Boys is one of the most shameful examples of injustice in our nation's history. • It makes clear that in the Deep South of the 1930's, jurors were not willing to accord a black charged with raping a white woman the usual presumption of innocence. • In fact, one may argue that the presumption seemed reversed: a black was presumed guilty unless he could establish his innocence beyond a reasonable doubt. • The cases show that to jurors, black lives didn't count for much. • The jurors that in April, 1933 had just voted to sentence Haywood Patterson to death were seen laughing and joking after the decision.
The trials of the Scottsboro Boys gave energy to a young civil rights movement, brought attention to issues of racial, religious, and economic justice in the South, and made and destroyed political careers. • It is a story that shouldn't be forgotten.
BROWN vs. BOARD OF ED. Brown vs. Board of Education • Although the famous court case,, Brown v. The Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, had declared that school segregation in the South was unconstitutional, many Southern states refused to integrate their schools. • Little Rock Central High School in Arkansas was one such school. After several years of stalling, it was to have begun the 1957 school year desegregated. • On September 2, the night before the first day of school, Governor Faubus announced that he had ordered the Arkansas National Guard to monitor the school.
Brown vs. Board of Education • When a group of nine black students arrived at Central High on September 3, they were kept from entering by the National Guardsmen. • On September 20, an injunction against Governor Faubus was issued and three days later the group of nine students returned to Central High School. • Although the students were not physically injured, a mob of 1,000 townspeople prevented them from remaining at school. • Finally, after many diplomatic efforts, President Eisenhower intervened militarily, ordering 1,000 paratroopers and 10,000 National Guardsmen to Little Rock, and on September 25, Central High School was desegregated.
Bush leads King groundbreaking ceremony By STEPHEN MANNING, Associated Press Writer Mon Nov 13, 6:54 PM ET WASHINGTON - Martin Luther King Jr. belongs among American icons like Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln, national leaders said Monday at the ceremonial groundbreaking for a King memorial. "We give Martin Luther King his rightful place among the many Americans honored on the National Mall," President Bush told a crowd of about 5,000. King's memorial, he said, "will unite the men who declared the promise of America and defended the promise of America with the man who redeemed the promise of America." The King memorial, slated to open in the spring of 2008, will be the first monument for a civilian and black leader on the large park at Washington's core. It is also probably among the last monuments on the Mall following a 2003 vote in Congress to sharply limit development of the parkland.
“We hold these truths to be self-evident: That all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, and among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Thomas Jefferson, US Declaration of Independence
