Jim Crow

1. Jim Crow

2. A slave after being whipped by his foreman in 1863. His master did fire the foreman, probably because he lost two weeks work from the slave due to the severity of the beating.

3. Jim Crow.Southern Whites may have lost the Civil War, but in a very real sense they won the peace, as institutionalized racism in new forms (aka Jim Crow) had resurfaced in the South almost immediately after the abolition of slavery and end of Reconstruction. The legal phrase describing this was “separate but equal” and was based largely on the Second Morrill Act of 1890 which stated that states establishing federally funded land grant colleges should not use race as the basis of admission or should establish separate but equal institutions for people of color. Southern legislatures seized upon this principle to expand segregation to a wide array of institutions as public transportation, restrooms, drinking fountains, and restaurants.

4. At the same time, Southern states, starting with Mississippi in 1890, adopted new constitutions that effectively disenfranchised any Blacks who had gained full citizenship rights during Reconstruction. Poll taxes, literacy and comprehension tests, and strictly documented residency requirements were the means by which Blacks, and many poor whites, were kept from voting, holding office, and serving on juries, the last being especially crucial to keeping the legal system fair.

5. Violence on an organized or quasi-legal level was also a means of repression. The most infamous organization was the Ku Klux Klan, in particular its second incarnation (1915-44). Known for their white robes and conical hoods, the Klan terrorized Blacks through burning crosses (as warnings) or outright violence. KKK propaganda and extreme acts of racism done openly in public especially peaked early in the 20th century.

6. However, racial violence didn’t require organized backing, as long as the legal system of all-white juries was in place to acquit even the most obviously guilty defendants. Nothing bore this out more than the murder of Emmett Till (top) and the acquittal of his murderers, J. W. Milam and Roy Bryant (below at the trial and celebrating their acquittal), by an all white jury after less than an hour of deliberation. Later, Milam and Bryant sold the true story to Look Magazine, knowing they couldn’t be tried a second time for the same crime.

7. The murder of Emmett Till (left) was the first example of TV bringing the brutality of Jim Crow racism into the national spotlight. Mamie Till-Mobley, Emmett’s mother (below left) especially stirred a reaction by insisting on an open casket to show her son’s mangled face to the world (below right). Northern reporters at the trial faced open hostility from Southerners as if they were from a foreign country. When a Black congressman from the North showed up for the trial, locals were dumbfounded who couldn’t conceive of an African American being elected to office.

8. Lynching was a term derived from the infamous Willie Lynch, meaning to murder an accused person by mob action without lawful trial, as by hanging. Because African-Americans were prohibited by U.S. law to "testify against a white man," they could be easily framed for the unscrupulous deeds of others. Without "due process," vengeful Lynch Mobs would exact their own brand of "swift justice. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ State White Black Total ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Alabama 48 299 347 Arizona 31 0 31 Arkansas 58 226 284 California 41 2 43 Colorado 65 3 68 Delaware 0 1 1 Florida 25 257 282 Georgia 39 492 531 Idaho 20 0 20 Illinois 15 19 34 Indiana 33 14 47 Iowa 17 2 19 Kansas 35 19 54 Kentucky 63 142 205 Louisiana 56 335 391 Maine 1 0 1 Maryland 2 27 29

9. " In the 1920s there was even a series of postcards published with pictures of Blacks being lynched, as if it were a thing to be proud of. Below: A picture of a lynching in Duluth, Mn. in 1920 that appeared as one of a series of postcards, showing that racism was by no means confined to the South. Above right: KKK members force their victim to pose for a picture before lynching him. Below rt: another mob action in Omaha, Nebraska in 1911.

10. “Eyes on the Prize”

11. In 1943, towards the end of the Second World War, another new technology made its debut on a plantation near Clarksdale, Mississippi: the mechanical cotton picker. Its inventors meant to ease farm workers from the backbreaking labor of picking cotton by hand. Instead, it put thousands of African-Americans in the South out of work. This triggered the next, and biggest, wave of the Great Migration to cities in the North. However, the influx of so many poor people just led to more crowded cities with fewer jobs. Old Red now resides in the Agricultural wing of the Smithsonian.

12. At the same time, thousands of African Americans who had served their country during World War II (such as the Tuskegee Airmen below) were returning home, feeling entitled to more rights than the various forms of racism had allowed them up to that point. Also, exposure of the atrocities of the Holocaust at the end of the war, while specifically concerning racism against the Jews, carried over in many people’s consciousness to awareness of racism in America and where that could lead. Out of these frustrations and rising expectations arose the Civil Rights movement.

13. In 1954 in one of the landmark rulings in American legal history, Brown vs. Board of Education, the Supreme Court overturned the principle of “separate but equal”, thus opening the way for the integration of American schools. Two years later, this ruling was put to the test as nine African American students (top left)tried to enroll in the all-white public high school in Little Rock Arkansas. Because of the violent reactions against integration this triggered, President Eisenhower sent the elite 101st Airborne (bottom left) to calm the turmoil at Little Rock. Although the nine students had to be constantly escorted and guarded, they made it through the year. The long process of integrating America’s schools had begun.

14. The Montgomery Bus Boycott in 1955 was the first major challenge to the separate but equal principle. When an African American woman, Rosa Parks (below), was arrested for refusing to move to the back of a public bus for a white passenger, the African American community in Montgomery Alabama organized a boycott of the city bus system. Since Blacks were a major source the city’s revenues, this cost Montgomery a lot of money for months on end while the boycott lasted. Finally the city gave in and integrated its buses.

15. Martin Luther King Jr. The central figure in the Civil Rights movement who emerged from the Montgomery Bus Boycott was a young preacher from Atlanta, Martin Luther King Jr. King had studied the nonviolent tactics used by Gandhi to win India’s independence from Britain in 1947. He saw that the new medium of television would make such tactics even more effective since they would expose many more people across the country and world to the brutality of racism in the South, thus winning wide public support for his movement and putting pressure on the federal government to intervene. This had become apparent in the 1950s with the heavy media coverage of the Montgomery Bus Boycott and the murder of Emmett Till. Right: a mug shot of King after one of the numerous times he was arrested for non-violent civil disobedience in his fight for civil rights.

16. The key to King’s strategy was to keep his marches peaceful in the face of brutal police reprisals. Since they had rarely, if ever, been challenged like this before, the authorities typically would react violently with clubs, tear gas, attack dogs, and high pressure hoses, figuring no one would notice, since no one had paid attention to the plight of Blacks in the South before. However, there was one new factor in the equation that made a huge difference from before: television.

17. King realized the power of this new medium, since it broadcast graphic images instead of just words into millions of homes across America. The images of peaceful demonstrators being beaten and attacked with high-pressure hoses and police dogs graphically imbedded the plight of African Americans into millions of viewers’ consciousness and generated the sort of public sympathy and federal support that King needed. These images broadcast by the liberal media especially resonated with white families in the North for whom race was a distant issue, so it was safe to sympathize with the marchers.

18. The power of these images especially hit home with Peter Rodino, member of the House judiciary sub-committee hearing on the Kennedy civil rights bill, 1963: “I was attending a conference at Geneva… and the incident of the police dog attacking the Negro in Birmingham was printed all over the world. One of the delegates from one of the nations represented at the conference there showed me the front page of the European edition of the Times and he was a little more frank than some of the others, and he asked me, ‘Is this the way you practice democracy?’ And I had no answer.”

19. Below: James Meredith being escorted to register as the first Black student at the University of Mississippi, 1962 Right: Some time later Meredith was shot (not fatally) for his efforts. Despite such actions, Meredith persevered with his education and went on to graduate.

20. Each round of such images led to more popular support for the Civil Rights Movement in the North, which encouraged more protests, leading to more violent reprisals, more TV coverage, and so on. One famous incident was the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church on September 15th, 1963 when four little African American girls were killed.

21. In the early 1960s, many young northern Whites went south to help the movement along. When some of them were killed in the reprisals, sympathy among northern Whites especially grew even more. Among the most dramatic events was the freedom ride in 1961 by a racially mixed group of people through the South to challenge segregation on public transportation. Things turned especially bad at the Greyhound bus station in Anniston, Alabama when a mob slashed the tires of the freedom riders’ bus. The bus raced out of town then broke down. The mob caught up, firebombed the bus and badly beat the passengers.

22. Freedom Summer (1964) In the summer of 1964, a number of young idealistic Northerners went to Mississippi to help register Black voters. On June 21st, police arrested three young men, a 21-year-old black Mississippian, James Chaney, and two white New Yorkers, Andrew Goodman, 20, and Michael Schwerner, 24, near Philadelphia, Mississippi on trumped up charges. That night they released them into the charge of Ku Klux Klansmen who beat and murdered them. The FBI arrested 18 men, but state prosecutors refused to try them, saying there wasn’t enough evidence. So the FBI brought federal charges of conspiracy (but not murder) in 1967 and got seven of the men convicted, for which none of them served more than six years. Eight others were acquitted by all-white juries, and three others went free because of mistrials. One mistrial, that of Edgar Ray “Preacher” Killen, occurred because of a deadlocked jury where one woman couldn’t bear to convict a preacher. If the murder of Blacks aroused sympathy in the North, the murder of Whites produced outrage.

23. Deputy Sheriff Price and Sheriff Rainey at a hearing in 1964 after arraignment in the murder of three civil rights workers show their contempt for the legal process, indicating how deeply rooted Jim Crow was in the South.

24. In 2005, four decades later, Edgar Ray Killen, then 80, was charged with three counts of murder. He was finally convicted on the lower charge of manslaughter and sentenced to a maximum sentence of 60 years. The grand jury declined to indict the seven other surviving conspirators indicted back in 1967.

25. Civil rights protestors try to get service at a segregated restaurant, a common tactic in the early days of the movement. Typically, they were showered with abuse and even violence.

26. The Civil Rights March in Washington, D.C., 1963 where Martin Luther King Jr. gave his famous “I have a Dream” speech. The next year, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act.

27. The Democratic President, Kennedy, was initially reluctant to get involved, since the Democrats drew much of their support from southern whites, who mostly opposed the Civil Rights Movement. However, he, President Johnson, Congress and the courts, eventually got on board, striking down racist laws and passing legislation that culminated with the Civil Rights Act in 1964. Bit by bit, schools, restaurants, and other public facilities across the country were officially desegregated schools, although there was still a long way to go as far as ending racism was concerned.

28. The Interstate Commerce Clause.Federal involvement in the Civil Rights movement wasoften based on the Commerce Clause, sometimes called the Interstate Commerce Clause, in the U.S. Constitution (Article I, Section 8, Clause 3). This gave Congress the power "to regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes". Its primary domestic purpose originally was to keep interior waterways open and free for trade and not subject to local or state tolls.

29. However, its use was expanded to protect civil rights in anything that vaguely involved interstate commerce. Thus in Heart of Atlanta Motel v. United States, 379 U.S. 241 (1964), the Supreme Court ruled that since most of a motel’s customers were from out of state, that constituted interstate commerce and gave the federal government the right to dictate that all potential customers be treated equally, regardless of race. Similarly, in Daniel v. Paul, 395 U.S. 298 (1969) the court ruled that the federal government could regulate a recreational facility because three-fourths of the items its snack bar sold came from out of state.

30. Left: George Wallace, governor of Alabama and one of the most prominent opponents of civil rights. Below: Martin Luther King leading a march in Selma, Alabama. Below left: Residents of Selma Alabama

31. Police attack hundreds of marchers at the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama (3/7/1965).

33. Left: Cambridge, Md., 1964: The arrest of a SNCC demonstrator and Below: Civil Rights demonstrators confront the National Guard.

34. Eventually, King’s opponents in the South caught on to his tactics and worked to thwart them in various ways. For one thing, they learned to exercise more restraint in dealing with demonstrations, thus making them less interesting to watch on TV and therefore reducing media coverage. Another tactic was to open private facilities, such as schools and swimming pools, where only White children could go, thus leaving the public schools and pools inadequately funded by White-controlled state and local governments. Therefore, the struggle was just beginning.

35. Martin Luther King especially encountered these problems when he moved the Civil Rights Movement to the North, which on the surface was much less blatantly racist. However, when northern Whites faced integration as real issues in their own neighborhoods and schools rather than just as abstract Southern issues viewed on TV, they often proved as intransigent as Whites in the South. During a march for equal housing opportunities in Cicero, Illinois, King was hit in the head with a rock by an angry spectator.

36. Black Power: The Movement starts to split

37. Elijah Muhammad, Malcolm X, and the Nation of Islam Not all African Americans followed King’s path to peaceful integration, or integration at all. Especially notable in this respect was Elijah Muhammad, leader of the Nation of Islam. He saw Whites as “blue-eyed devils” who could never be trusted, and Christianity as a religion of subservience used by Whites to keep Blacks down.

38. While King worked for racial harmony, Elijah Muhammad preached his own brand of separate but equal, urging Blacks to be self-sufficient and independent of White society, opening their own businesses and building their own homes. Although he didn’t preach aggressive violence, he didn’t condone pacifism either: “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.” Ultimately, Elijah Muhammad did envisage a Black Nation born out of revolution and overthrowing the White Man. As this poster indicates, Elijah Muhammad had a somewhat exalted view of himself as the sole messenger of God.

39. A man who stands for nothing will fall for anything.”—Malcolm X Elijah Muhammad’s religion had limited appeal among Blacks, but it did attract enough followers to open seventy congregations in thirty cities across America by 1960. Among his converts was a bright ex-con, Malcolm Little, who did away with his “white” surname, just changing it to X

40. At first, Malcolm X was a devoted follower of Elijah Muhammad, but over time, he started to carve his own spiritual path. Key to this was his pilgrimage to Mecca where he saw all different races, including Whites, as devoted Muslims, which contradicted Elijah Muhammad’s own narrowly racial view of Islam. As Malcolm formed his own views, this angered, and maybe even worse, aroused the jealousy of, Elijah with whom he eventually broke.

41. Malcolm was a brilliant, powerful and funny speaker who, above all else, made African Americans, both men and women, proud of themselves. He was particularlyrespectful to Black women, making them feel beautiful in a culture that especially derided them. He didn’t mince words, saying the assassination of JFK, whom he said had been involved in violence and repression in Asia, Latin America, and Africa, was “chickens coming home to roost.” By the same token, he founded the Organization of Afro-American Unity and was increasingly open to reconciliation with all races, including Whites who would treat all other races with respect.

42. Unfortunately, on February 21st, 1965, Malcolm X was gunned down. Many have suspected Elijah Muhammad of being behind the murder. Where Malcolm would have gone from there if he had lived is anyone’s guess.

43. From Cassius Clay to Muhammad Ali. Cassius Clay was a brash young black man who emerged from Louisville, Kentucky to become the world heavyweight champion boxer, possibly the greatest boxer in the history of the sport. He was called the Louisville Lip and The Mouth for his brazen ego and predictions (which usually came true) of how quickly he would defeat an upcoming opponent. Concerning the current champion, Sonny Liston, he said, “The man can’t talk. The man can’t fight. The man needs talking lessons. The man needs boxing lessons. And since he’s gonna fight me, he needs falling lessons. I’m gonna give him to the local zoo after I whup him….He’s too ugly to be the world champ. The world champ should be pretty, like me.”

44. On February 26, 1964, the day after he pummeled Liston (below) and took the crown (just as he had predicted), Clay announced he had converted to Islam and was a follower of Elijah Muhammad. A week later, Elijah honored him with the name Muhammad Ali, an honorific title that people usually had to wait ten years to receive. However, Elijah had recently broken with Malcolm X and probably was trying to use Clay against him. Although he was also a close friend of Malcolm, he followed Elijah’s direction to break with him.

45. “Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee” is how Ali described his style of fighting. Instead of the old-fashioned lumbering, slug-it-out style of boxing, he based his success on his mobility & ability to wear out his opponent’s legs as well as arms.

46. Clay’s acceptance of Islam and change of name came as a shock to White America. Starting with Jackie Robinson sixteen years earlier, African Americans in professional sports had been very careful to act respectfully and respectably in order to gain their acceptance by White sports fans. By and large, it worked, especially with younger fans, including this author whose current hero was the Chicago Cubs’ star shortstop, Ernie Banks (below). Muhammad Ali’s change of religion and name was the first example of an African American athlete “betraying” those expectations.

47. Ali he was in no way apologetic about it either: “I ain’t no Christian. I can’t be when I see all the colored people fighting for forced integration get blowed up. They get hit by stones and chewed by dogs and they blow up a Negro church and don‘t find the killer…I’m the heavyweight champion, but right now there are some neighborhoods I can’t move into…I’m no troublemaker. I’m a good boy. I never have done anything wrong. I have never been to jail. I have never been to court. I don’t join any integration marches…. A rooster crows only when it sees the light. Put him in the dark and he’ll never crow. I have seen the light and I’m crowing.”

48. Ali again: “The government should …get down on their hands and knees every morning and thank God that 22 million black people have not become anti-American. You’ve given us every right to. The whole world would side with us if we became anti-American.”

49. Another issue between Ali and the U.S. government was the draft. Right before the Liston fight, and again right after, he took and failed the military qualification exam, scoring in the 16th percentile when the cutoff for passing was 30. However, as the Vietnam War called for more and more draftees, the passing score was lowered from 30 to 15, making Ali eligible.

50. Although Ali had previously taken no strong position on the war, now that he was eligible for the draft he claimed he was a conscientious objector on the basis of being Muslim. At first, the judge granted him CO status, but the government, concerned this ruling would allow anyone to become a Muslim to avoid the draft, ordered the Kentucky selective service appeal board to ignore the ruling and draft Ali. In April 1967 he refused to take part in the induction ceremony and was tried and convicted by an all-white jury of draft evasion. Below: Top African American athletes join Ali at a press conference in 1967 where he explains his reasons for rejecting the draft.