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True peace is not merely the absence of tension;
it is the presence of justice.
Martin Luther King, Jr., Stride Toward FreedomWith nonviolent resistance,
no individual or group need submit to any wrong,
nor need anyone resort to violence in order to right a wrong.
Martin Luther King, Jr.I submit that an individual who breaks a law
that conscience tells him is unjust,
and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment
in order to arouse the conscience
of the community over its injustice,
is in reality expressing the highest respect for law.
Martin Luther King, Jr., "Letter from Birmingham Jail"Unearned suffering is redemptive.
Suffering, the nonviolent resister realizes,
has tremendous educational and transforming possibilities.
Martin Luther King, Jr., Stride Toward FreedomToday the choice is no longer between violence and nonviolence.
It is either nonviolence or nonexistence.
Martin Luther King, Jr., Stride Toward FreedomThe aftermath of nonviolence is reconciliation
and the creation of the beloved community,
while the aftermath of violence is tragic bitterness.
Martin Luther King, Jr., Stride Toward FreedomWe Mexicans here in the United States,
as well as all other farm laborers,
are engaged in another struggle
for the freedom and dignity which poverty denies us.
But it must not be a violent struggle,
even if violence is used against us.
Cesar Chavez, September 16, 1965History will judge societies and governments-
and their institutions-not by how big they are
or how well they serve the rich and the powerful,
but by how effectively they respond
to the needs of the poor and the helpless.
Cesar Chavez
In 1909 William Lloyd Garrison's grandson, Oswald Garrison
Villard,
wrote a call for a national conference to renew the struggle
for civil liberty.
Supported by Jane Addams, William Dean Howells,
Ida B. Wells, John Dewey,
W. E. B. Du Bois, and others, they formed
the
National Association for the Advancement of Colored People
(NAACP).
Du Bois became director of publicity and research and
begin editing and writing for the Crisis magazine.
Arthur
B. Spingarn led the legal effort and got the grandfather clauses
that
blocked descendants of non-voters (slaves) from voting declared
unconstitutional.
By 1921 the NAACP had more than 400 branches
in the United States.
Howard University law school dean Charles
Houston worked for the NAACP
and in 1935 launched a campaign to
remedy educational inequalities.
He was assisted by young Thurgood
Marshall and in 1938
argued before the US Supreme Court that Lloyd
Lionel Gaines
had a right to attend the University of Missouri
School of Law.
In 1941 A. Philip Randolph, who was president of the
Brotherhood
of Sleeping Car Porters, called upon African Americans to march
on Washington to demand an end to racial discrimination in government
hiring
and an end to the segregation in the US armed forces.
Randolph
and NAACP executive secretary Walter White
met with President
Franklin Roosevelt before the march,
and on June 25 Roosevelt
issued an executive order prohibiting racial discrimination
in
federal hiring and establishing the Fair Employment Practice Committee
(FEPC).
In 1942 Bayard Rustin and students led by white George Houser
and black James Farmer in the Chicago chapter of the
Fellowship
of Reconciliation (FOR) formed a committee that later
became known
as the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE).
They and A. J. Muste
were strongly influenced by the book War Without Violence
by Krishnalal Shridharani, a former associate of Gandhi.
That
year Rustin was beaten and arrested for sitting
at the front of
buses going from Louisville to Nashville.
Asserting the power
of love, he stood up to the injustice
and found that his nonviolent
action was supported by some witnesses.
In 1943 CORE activists
protested by sitting in segregated Chicago restaurants.
In Morgan
v. Virginia the US Supreme Court in June 1946 declared
unconstitutional
the Virginia law requiring segregated seating on interstate buses.
The next year sixteen people from FOR and CORE undertook a
Journey
of Reconciliation to test the judgment, and four riders
arrested
in North Carolina were sentenced to thirty days on a chain gang.
Meanwhile the FEPC was not too effective because it lacked the
power
to enforce the law, and Congress ended its funding in 1946.
In 1944 Swedish sociologist Gunnar Myrdal published a massive
study on race relations
called An American Dilemma: The Negro
Problem and Modern Democracy,
describing the conflict between
the American creed of equal rights
with the actual discrimination
against Negroes.
In December 1946 President Harry Truman appointed
a Committee on Civil Rights
that filed a scathing report on the
crimes of lynching, police brutality,
discrimination in public
accommodations, and the lack of justice in the courts.
They found
that "separate but equal" had failed and that
the rights
to voting and education had not yet been secured.
They recommended
magnifying the civil rights section in the Justice department,
establishing a Commission on Civil Rights under the President,
making state and local police forces more professional, and action
by Congress
to protect voting rights and equal access to employment,
education, and public services.
In March 1948 Randolph warned
President Truman that he would lead
a civil disobedience campaign
to protest segregation in the military.
In July, Truman issued
an executive order for equal opportunity
in the armed services,
and Randolph ended his call for civil disobedience.
Thurgood Marshall became chief counsel for the NAACP in 1940,
and in 1946 he set up the NAACP's Legal Defense Fund.
At an NAACP
conference in New York in 1950 he argued that the "separate
but equal"
doctrine of Plessy v. Ferguson from 1896
was unconstitutional
by the 14th amendment because separate schools
could not be equal.
In 1951 Marshall and NAACP attorneys challenged
school segregation in South Carolina, Kansas, and Delaware.
On
May 17, 1954 the new US chief justice Earl Warren announced
a
unanimous decision in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka
overturning Plessy v. Ferguson and accepting the plaintiffs'
argument by the
NAACP lawyers that segregation has a detrimental
effect on colored children,
making separate educational facilities
inherently unequal.
Implementation was delayed by another hearing,
but a year later
the Supreme Court decided that educational authorities
have the primary responsibility
to solve these problems and must
admit students
"on a racially nondiscriminatory basis with
all deliberate speed."
The first major challenge came in
September 1957 when
Arkansas governor Orval Faubus used the National
Guard to deny
nine Negro children admission to Central High School
in Little Rock.
A district court ordered him to remove the Guard,
and he did so;
but the black students were assaulted by an angry
mob.
President Eisenhower then ordered the mob blocking the students
to disperse
and made a speech announcing that he was sending in
a thousand paratroopers
to enforce the law by protecting the minority
students.
From 1956 until his tragic assassination in 1968 Martin Luther
King, Jr. was the
foremost leader in African Americans' nonviolent
quest for civil rights and a better life.
He was born on January
15, 1929 in Atlanta, Georgia
and was named after his father, who
was a successful Baptist preacher.
His father taught him self-respect
in the face of racial discrimination.
Martin started at Morehouse
College in Atlanta when he was only 15,
and he graduated four
years later.
Choosing the ministry over medicine and law, he attended
Crozer Theological Seminary in Pennsylvania for three years.
While
there he heard A. J. Muste lecture, and after hearing Mordecai
Johnson lecture
on Gandhi he went out and bought every book he
could find on Gandhi and nonviolence.
Martin had already read
Thoreau's "Essay on Civil Disobedience" at Morehouse;
he was so moved by the idea of refusing to cooperate
with an evil
system that he reread it several times.
In his theological studies
he leaned toward the social gospel of Walter Rauschenbusch.
He
read Marx and rejected his materialism and deprecation of individual
freedom;
however, he also questioned the materialism and injustices
of capitalism.
In reading Gandhi, King realized that the love ethic of Jesus
could go beyond
individuals and be applied to the conflicts of
racial groups and nations.
He discovered the method for social
reform in
Gandhi's soul force (satyagraha) and nonviolence
(ahimsa).
After being elected student body president and
graduating first in his class at Crozer,
King moved on to Boston
University, where he earned his Ph.D. in Theology.
In 1953 he
married Coretta Scott, a bright student of music,
and they eventually
had four children.
Believing in the guidance of a personal God
and equipped with the techniques
of nonviolence, King accepted
a pastorate in Montgomery, Alabama,
hoping he could help his people
achieve social justice.
King had only recently completed his doctoral dissertation
and gotten settled
in the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church when the
issue of
racial segregation on the public buses erupted in Montgomery.
On May 17, 1954 the United States Supreme Court had declared,
"Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal,"1
and in 1955
the same Court ordered all public schools to be desegregated
"with all deliberate speed."
In Montgomery, King had
become active in the
National Association for the Advancement
of Colored People (NAACP)
and in the integrated Alabama Council
on Human Relations.
In March 1955 a fifteen-year-old girl had
been arrested for refusing to give up her seat
to a white passenger
on the bus.
King was on the committee that protested this, but
no action was taken.
On December 1, 1955 Mrs. Rosa Parks felt her feet were too
tired
for her to stand up for a white man, who had boarded after
her.
The bus driver ordered her to stand up and give her seat
to the white man, but she refused.
She was arrested and taken
to the courthouse.
From there she called E. D. Nixon, who in turn
made several calls.
The Women's Political Council proposed a one-day
boycott of the buses.
The next morning, which was a Friday, Nixon
called King, and he offered
the Dexter Avenue Church as a meeting
place for that night.
Over forty black leaders showed up, and
they agreed to boycott the buses
on the following Monday and hold
a mass meeting Monday night.
Leaflets were mimeographed and distributed
announcing these actions.
Committees were organized, and alternative
transportation was arranged.
Recalling Thoreau's words about not
cooperating with an evil system,
King thought of the movement
as massive noncooperation.
The word spread, and on Monday morning the Montgomery buses
were practically empty except for a few white passengers.
Mrs.
Parks was convicted that morning of disobeying the
city's segregation
ordinance and fined ten dollars and court costs.
Her attorney
appealed.
That afternoon Dr. King was elected president of what
became
the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA).
The Holt
Street Baptist Church had five thousand people standing outside
listening to loudspeakers for the evening meeting.
King spoke
for the hearts of many when he declared that they were
"tired
of being segregated and humiliated."2
He affirmed that their
only alternative was to protest for freedom and justice.
Christian
love and nonviolent principles provided the basis for his advice.
No one must be intimidated to keep them from riding the buses.
He said, "Our method will be that of persuasion, not coercion.
We will only say to the people, 'Let your conscience be your guide.'"3
He quoted the statement by Booker T. Washington not to let anyone
drag you down so low as to make you hate him.
King concluded his
speech,
If you will protest courageously,
and yet with dignity and Christian love,
when the history books are written in future generations,
the historians will have to pause and say,
“There lived a great people—a black people—
who injected new meaning and dignity
into the veins of civilization.”
This is our challenge and our overwhelming responsibility.4
Ralph Abernathy proposed three moderate demands,
which were
unanimously approved at the mass meeting:
1) courteous treatment
by bus operators;
2) passengers to be seated on a first-come,
first-served basis
with Negroes in the back and whites in the
front; and
3) Negro bus drivers to be employed in predominantly
Negro routes.
In his book Stride Toward Freedom King explained how
Christian love
and nonviolent methods guided the movement and
how he spoke in weekly meetings.
I stressed that the use of violence in our struggle
would be both impractical and immoral.
To meet hate with retaliatory hate would do nothing
but intensify the existence of evil in the universe.
Hate begets hate; violence begets violence;
toughness begets a greater toughness.
We must meet the forces of hate with the power of love;
we must meet physical force with soul force.
Our aim must never be to defeat or humiliate the white man,
but to win his friendship and understanding.5
Although to King nonviolence was a way of life, he was glad
that the black people
were willing to accept it as a method; he
presented it simply as Christianity in action.
In Stride Toward
Freedom King elucidated
six key points about the philosophy
of nonviolence.
First, it is not based on cowardice; although
it may seem passive physically,
it is spiritually active, requiring
the courage to stand up against injustice.
Second, nonviolence
does not seek to defeat the opponent
but rather to win his understanding
to create "the beloved community."
Third, the attack
is directed at the evil, not at the people who are doing the evil;
for King the conflict was not between whites and blacks
but between
justice and injustice.
Fourth, in nonviolence there is a willingness
to accept suffering without retaliating.
Fifth, not only is physical
violence avoided but also spiritual violence; love replaces hatred.
Sixth, nonviolence has faith that justice will prevail because
it is a universal law.
Meanwhile, to get people to work and back, black taxi companies
had lowered their fares, car pools were arranged, and many people
walked.
However, the city prohibited the taxi companies from doing
this business
and threatened people with vagrancy and illegal-hitchhiking
charges;
rumors spread that drivers might lose their licenses
or insurance.
King was arrested in January for driving 30 in a
25 mile-per-hour zone,
even though he was driving very carefully
since he was aware of being followed.
The Kings' house was bombed;
Coretta and a friend
escaped injury by moving quickly to the back
of the house.
Martin rushed home from his meeting, and a furious
mob gathered outside.
He calmed them down and advised them to
put down their weapons and go home.
He said, "We cannot solve
this problem through retaliatory violence.
We must meet violence
with nonviolence.
We must love our white brothers no matter what
they do to us."6
When the mayor tried to speak, he was booed
and threatened;
but again King quieted the crowd.
His presence
and words had prevented a bloody riot.
The Kings often received
threatening phone calls; but even after the bomb blast,
King would
not allow a weapon in his house.
While King was away lecturing at Fisk University in Nashville,
the Montgomery attorney began arresting MIA leaders
for violating
an old state law against boycotts.
Against the advice of his father,
Martin returned to Montgomery to be placed under arrest.
He was
released on bail.
On March 22 Judge Carter found eighty-nine defendants
guilty.
King was sentenced to pay a fine of $500 or serve 386
days hard labor.
Appeals were filed.
On June 4, 1956 a federal
court held that bus segregation was unconstitutional.
However,
the city attorneys appealed to the United States Supreme Court.
In November the city tried to ban the car pools.
While they were
in a Montgomery court on this charge, the Supreme Court affirmed
the decision declaring Alabama's state and local laws
requiring
segregation on buses unconstitutional.
Rev. King told a mass meeting that they must act with "calm
dignity and wise restraint"
and not let their emotions run
wild.
He said, "We must now move from protest to reconciliation."7
Meetings were held to prepare the people for integration of the
buses.
Training sessions in nonviolent techniques enabled "actors"
to play out different roles before a critical audience, which
would discuss the results.
Integrated bus suggestions were printed
which recommended
"complete nonviolence in word and action"
and admonished them to be
loving enough to absorb evil and understanding
enough to convert an enemy into a friend.
A few days before Christmas,
after more than a year's boycott,
the black ministers of Montgomery
led the way in riding integrated buses.
In January a few acts
of terrorism by the Ku Klux Klan occurred,
but again King urged
nonviolence and the way of the cross.
After a few weeks the transportation
systems
had returned to normal with integrated buses.
The Montgomery success gave King national prominence.
Along
with Ralph Abernathy, Fred Shuttlesworth, and C. K. Steele, he
formed
the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) with
headquarters in Atlanta.
He urged President Eisenhower to call
for a White House Conference on Civil Rights.
When the Eisenhower
administration failed to respond adequately,
King organized a
"Prayer Pilgrimage of Freedom" which drew 37,000 marchers
to the Lincoln Memorial in Washington on May 17, 1957.
King led
the cry of blacks for the ballot so that
they could participate
more fully in the legislative process.
In 1958 Stride Toward Freedom came out calling for
a
militant and nonviolent mass movement.
King suggested in this
book that if they remain nonviolent, then public opinion
will
be magnetically attracted to them rather than to the instigators
of violence.
A nonviolent mass movement is power under discipline
seeking justice.
He summarized his nonviolent intentions this
way:
We will take direct action against injustice
without waiting for other agencies to act.
We will not obey unjust laws or submit to unjust practices.
We will do this peacefully, openly, cheerfully
because our aim is to persuade.
We adopt the means of nonviolence
because our end is a community at peace with itself.
We will try to persuade with our words,
but if our words fail, we will try to persuade with our acts.
We will always be willing to talk and seek fair compromise,
but we are ready to suffer when necessary
and even risk our lives
to become witnesses to the truth as we see it.8
He pointed out that nonviolence first affects the hearts of
those committed to it,
gives them greater self-respect and courage,
and then it stirs the conscience
of the opponents until reconciliation
is achieved.
He warned against using power to oppress others.
In an effort to achieve freedom in America, Asia, and Africa
we must not try to leap from a position of disadvantage
to one of advantage, thus subverting justice.
We must seek democracy
and not the substitution of one tyranny for another.
Our aim must never be to defeat or humiliate the white man.
We must not become victimized
with a philosophy of black supremacy.
God is not interested merely in the freedom
of black men, and brown men, and yellow men;
God is interested in the freedom of the whole human race.9
King suggested, "The constructive program ahead must include
a campaign to get Negroes to register and vote."10
He also
warned that in a world of ballistic missiles the choice was no
longer
between violence and nonviolence but between nonviolence
and nonexistence.
On Lincoln's birthday in 1958 twenty-one mass meetings were
held
simultaneously in key southern cities calling for "freedom
now."
In September, King was arbitrarily arrested while in
the Montgomery courthouse.
He decided to refuse to pay bail or
the fine.
However, the officials preferred to pay his fine for
him
so that the taxpayers would not have to feed King for fourteen
days.
While autographing copies of his book in New York,
a psychotic
woman stabbed King in the chest with a sharp letter opener.
He
remained calm and waited for a surgeon to remove the knife-like
weapon.
Its point had been touching his aorta; he was told that
if he had merely sneezed, he probably would have died.
In February 1959 Martin Luther King made a pilgrimage to India
and returned even more confirmed in the principles of nonviolence.
In December, King called for a broad and bold
progress in the
southern campaign for equality.
In 1960 student activists organized
numerous sit-ins
at lunch counters in order to end discrimination.
King and James Lawson spoke on nonviolence at a meeting in Raleigh,
North Carolina,
and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee
(SNCC) was formed.
King and thirty-six others were arrested for
sitting
at the lunch counter in Rich's Department Store in Atlanta.
The judge sentenced King to six months hard labor.
This was on
October 25, and the election was only a few days away.
President Eisenhower considered making a public statement,
but
he and Vice President Nixon decided not to comment.
However, John
Kennedy and his brother Robert
made some phone calls urging King's
release.
Some say that this gesture helped Kennedy
win the election
over Nixon by a narrow margin.
King was elected chairman of the committee on the Freedom Rides
in 1961.
To protect the freedom riders from the onslaught
of violence,
King requested Attorney General Robert Kennedy to
send more federal marshals.
King explained, "The law may
not be able to make a man love me,
but it can keep him from Iynching
me."11
The Freedom Rides took the civil rights movement from
the
urban college campuses to the rural hamlets of the South.
King answered the call to help the movement in Albany, Georgia
to desegregate public parks and other facilities.
He and Ralph
Abernathy were arrested in December 1961 for refusing to
disperse.
They were tried the following February and sentenced
on July 10, 1962
to pay a fine or be imprisoned at hard
labor for 45 days.
They chose prison.
Again an anonymous person
paid the fines.
King then announced a civil disobedience campaign.
However, when two thousand people threw rocks and bottles at the
police,
he called for a "Day of Penitence" and a week
of prayer vigils.
King, Abernathy, and Dr. Anderson were arrested
at the first vigil.
They spent two weeks in jail before the trial
and then were given suspended sentences.
A new demonstration was
planned after their release,
but this time the city obtained a
federal injunction against the demonstration.
Since the federal
courts had always been their ally,
King reluctantly canceled the
march.
Many considered the Albany campaign a failure
because it
did not achieve desegregation;
but King felt they learned tactical
lessons and through
increased voter registration began to affect
elections more.
Five percent of the black population had accepted
nonviolence and had gone willingly to jail.
Fred Shuttlesworth of the Alabama Christian Movement for Human
Rights
had been working to desegregate Birmingham, but he was
meeting much resistance.
He requested the help of the SCLC, and
in April 1963 after the elections
involving Eugene "Bull"
Connor, they acted.
Their organization had improved since Albany,
and workshops
on nonviolence and direct-action techniques were
conducted.
They began with sit-ins involving a few arrests each
day.
Mass meetings with talks on nonviolence were held each evening.
Many volunteers came forward, and the movement grew into a nonviolent
army.
Each volunteer signed the following Commitment Card:
I hereby pledge myself—my person and body—
to the nonviolent movement.
Therefore, I will keep the following Ten Commandments:
1. Meditate daily on the teachings and life of Jesus.
2. Remember always that the nonviolent movement
in Birmingham seeks justice and reconciliation, not victory.
3. Walk and Talk in the manner of love, for God is love.
4. Pray daily to be used by God in order that all men might be free.
5. Sacrifice personal wishes in order that all men might be free.
6. Observe with both friend and foe the ordinary rules of courtesy.
7. Seek to perform regular service for others and for the world.
8. Refrain from the violence of fist, tongue, or heart.
9. Strive to be in good spiritual and bodily health.
10. Follow the directions of the movement and of the captain
on a demonstration.12
King chose to postpone his own arrest so that he could speak
to meetings
in the black community; he appealed to ministers
for
help in the struggle to improve social conditions.
On Saturday
April 6, forty-two were arrested for "parading without a
permit."
So far both sides were nonviolent, and they sang
on their way to jail.
The boycott of the downtown merchants was
effective.
There were kneel-ins at churches, sit-ins at the library,
and a march to the
county building for voter registration; the
jails began to fill.
They decided to disobey a state court injunction
because
they felt Alabama was misusing the judicial process.
Although
most of the leaders wanted King to stay free in order to raise
money,
he asked Ralph Abernathy to go to jail with him.
On Good
Friday they were arrested, and King was put in solitary confinement.
Coretta contacted President Kennedy to request help in improving
King's jail conditions,
and Harry Belafonte was able to raise
$50,000 for bail bonds.
On scraps of paper Martin Luther King wrote his famous letter
from Birmingham jail
in which he responded to ministers' public
charges
that his actions were "unwise and untimely."
He explained that he came to Birmingham because of the injustice
there.
They had gone through the four basic steps of a nonviolent
campaign:
collection of facts about injustice, negotiation, self-purification,
and direct action.
Just as Socrates had been an intellectual gadfly,
he too must struggle against injustice.
He stated the hard truth,
"We know through painful experience that freedom
is never
voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the
oppressed."13
He quoted Augustine, who said that "an
unjust law is no law at all."14
Segregation is unjust because
it damages the personality
and creates false concepts of superiority
and inferiority.
To break an unjust law "openly, lovingly,
and with a willingness
to accept the penalty"15 is to express
respect for real justice.
He pointed out that what Hitler did
in Germany was "legal,"
while aiding or comforting a
Jew was "illegal."
Their action did not create the tension;
it merely brought to the surface the seething hidden tensions.
Nonviolence offers a creative outlet for repressed emotions
which
might otherwise result in violence.
He said that if he is an extremist,
then like Jesus he is an extremist for love.
After eight days King and Abernathy accepted bail.
King then
suggested that they enlist young people in the campaign.
Andy
Young sent some who were too young to the library to learn something.
On May 2 over a thousand youths demonstrated and went to jail.
King explained in his book Why We Can't Wait that
all ages, sexes, races,
and even the disabled can be accepted
into a nonviolent army.
When the jails were almost full, Bull
Connor changed his tactics to violence,
turning on the water hoses,
sending in police with their clubs, and releasing the police dogs.
Moral indignation swept across the nation.
On May 4 the US Attorney
General sent mediators to seek a truce.
On May 10 an agreement
was reached granting the major demands:
desegregation of lunch
counters, rest rooms, fitting rooms, and drinking fountains;
upgrading
and hiring of blacks on a nondiscriminatory basis;
release of
all jailed persons; and establishing
communications between black
and white leaders.
Segregationists reacted by bombing the house of Martin's brother
A. D. King
at midnight on Saturday in order to incite a riot.
Followers of the movement sang "We Shall Overcome" to
stop the violence.
The next day President Kennedy sent in three
thousand federal troops.
On May 20 the Supreme Court decided that
demonstrations against segregated institutions are legal.
Justice
had triumphed.
King went on a speaking tour from Los Angeles to New York.
In Detroit on June 23, 1963 he led 125,000 people on a Freedom
Walk.
To this crowd he spoke of nonviolence as a strong method
of disarming the opponent.
He declared, "If a man hasn't
discovered something
that he will die for, he isn't fit to live!"16
At a conference with A. Philip Randolph and Roy Wilkins of
the NAACP,
John Lewis of SNCC, Dorothy Height of the National
Council of Negro Women,
James Farmer of CORE, and Whitney Young
of the Urban League,
they planned a march on Washington for "Jobs
and Freedom" in order to
put pressure on Congress to pass
President Kennedy's Civil Rights Bill.
Some 250,000 people, about
a third of them white,
congregated at the Lincoln Memorial on
August 28, 1963.
Randolph introduced King as the "moral leader
of the nation."
King began with his prepared speech about
how America had given
the Negro a bad check, and they had come
there to collect on the promises.
The great crowd's response inspired
him, and he put aside his text
and began to speak of his dream
of equality, brotherhood, and freedom -
a dream where people are
not judged by their skin color but by their character.
His oratory
symbolically tolled the bell of freedom
so that it would ring
out all across the land.
When the assassination of President Kennedy was announced,
King privately told Coretta that the same thing would happen to
him,
because "this is a sick society."17
The following
June, Dr. King and Abernathy were arrested in St. Augustine, Florida.
King explained how some people were trying to stop the movement
by threatening them with physical death; but he responded,
"If
physical death is the price that I must pay to free my white brother
and all my brothers and sisters from a permanent death of the
spirit,
then nothing can be more redemptive."18
On July 2,
1964 King personally witnessed
President Lyndon Johnson's signing
of the Civil Rights law.
King submitted an Economic Bill of Rights
to the Democratic Party platform committee.
He suggested that
the disadvantaged, who have been denied so long,
ought to receive
something comparable to the G.I. Bill of Rights.
At age thirty-five Dr. Martin Luther King became
the youngest
person ever to receive a Nobel Prize.
He accepted the prestigious
award for peace on behalf of the Movement,
saying it was "a
profound recognition that nonviolence is the answer to the crucial
political and racial questions of our time -
the need for man to
overcome oppression without resorting to violence."19
In 1965 the push for voter registration was accelerated,
and
Selma, Alabama was selected as the most challenging target.
Mass
meetings were held there throughout January and February.
On the
first day of February, King and Abernathy led a march of 250 blacks
and 15 whites to the courthouse, where they all were arrested.
On March 5 King spent two and a half hours with President Johnson
urging him to expedite the Voting Rights bill.
Two days later
he announced a 54-mile march from Selma to Montgomery.
Although
Governor Wallace prohibited the march,
King exhorted the people
to stand up for what is right.
SCLC strategy was for the leaders
to avoid arrest in the early stages of a campaign.
Thus King was
not at the front of the march when they were met by Alabama troopers
with gas masks, tear gas, clubs, horsemen with whips,
and deputies
with electric cattle prods.
The brutal attack was cheered by whites
on the sidelines.
King announced that he and Abernathy would lead another march.
A federal injunction was issued against it, but King made a
nationwide
appeal for ministers and others to join them.
This time they crossed
the bridge before coming to the troopers.
Fifteen hundred people
prayed on the road, and then to avoid
a violent confrontation
King asked them to turn back.
That night a white minister from
Boston was murdered by four Klansmen in Selma.
Demonstrations
were held across the country, and four thousand religious leaders
picketed the White House to push for the Voting Rights bill.
The
evening of the funeral President Johnson gave his "We shall
overcome" speech
and made the Voting Rights bill his top
priority.
The injunction against the march was lifted, and the
President federalized
the Alabama National Guard and sent troops
to protect the marchers.
On March 21 the march was successfully
carried out;
when they got to Montgomery, they were a crowd of
fifty thousand.
Again King's oratory lifted the people as he declared
that they would not have to
wait long for freedom because "no
lie can live forever,"
because "you will reap what you
sow,"
because "the arm of the moral universe is long
but it bends toward justice,"
and because "mine eyes
have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord."20
The Voting
Rights bill was signed on August 6, 1965.
James Lawson refused to fight in the Korean War
and was sent
to prison for his conscientious objection.
Paroled under Methodist
ministers, he went to India as a missionary
and studied the nonviolent
methods of Gandhi for three years.
While enrolled at Oberlin College
in Ohio, he traveled to Montgomery
during the bus boycott and
advised Martin Luther King, Jr.
on applying nonviolence in a mass
protest.
In 1958 Lawson and FOR minister Glenn Smiley
began offering
workshops on nonviolence in Nashville.
That year the NAACP won
some desegregation victories
using sit-ins in Kansas and Oklahoma.
On February 1, 1960 four black freshman from
North Carolina Agricultural
and Technical College sat in the Woolworth store
in Greensboro
without receiving service for an hour until the store closed.
CORE was contacted, and Gordon Carey came from New York
to organize
more sit-ins by students.
Fred Shuttlesworth was in North Carolina
then and
called SCLC's executive director, Ella Baker.
She called
people, and Ralph Abernathy helped students of
Alabama State College
to organize sit-ins in Montgomery.
Columbia students picketed
Woolworth's in New York city,
and Harlem congressman Adam Clayton
Powell
called for a national boycott of Woolworth stores.
In two
weeks the sit-ins spread to fifteen southern cities.
Julian Bond
at Morehouse College led the effort in Atlanta.
The Nashville students were prepared, and on February 18
they
mobilized two hundred people for sit-ins at several stores.
On
February 27 some white teens insulted and attacked
the Negroes
sitting at the lunch counter.
The Nashville police arrived and
arrested 81 black demonstrators but none of the whites;
those
arrested were replaced at the lunch counter by other protestors.
The black community in Nashville raised nearly $50,000 for bail,
but the judge turned his back on their black attorney,
Z. Alexander
Looby, and fined the demonstrators.
On March 2 at the Nashville
bus terminal 63 students were arrested.
Two weeks later four blacks
were finally served food there;
but while they ate, they were
beaten.
Black customers boycotted the offending Nashville stores.
Young John Lewis was arrested four times.
Lawson refused to withdraw
from the movement
and was expelled by Vanderbilt's Divinity School;
eleven faculty later resigned in protest when he was not re-admitted.
After four days of nonviolence classes at Orangeburg, South Carolina,
on March 15 a thousand Negroes protested lunch-counter discrimination;
police used fire hoses and tear gas, and 388 students were arrested.
Atlanta was changed forever when 76 students were arrested.
NAACP
executive secretary Roy Wilkins and Martin Luther King
both made
statements that the students would end segregation.
In April 1960 Ella Baker of the SCLC organized a conference
at
Shaw University in Raleigh, North Carolina for students
who wanted
to challenge racial discrimination.
Student leaders from 56 colleges
in twelve southern states attended,
and Lawson gave the keynote
speech.
They formed the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee
(SNCC, pronounced "snick"), and the SCLC contributed
$800 to get it started.
After a bomb destroyed much of Looby's
house in Nashville,
2,000 Negroes marched in protest to City Hall.
In early May four theaters and six lunch counters
in Nashville
ended their Jim Crow policies.
That spring lunch counters in seven
Tennessee cities were desegregated.
Although protestors remained
nonviolent, sporadic acts of violence
broke out against them in
various places.
In Jackson, Mississippi police used clubs, tear
gas, and dogs against demonstrators,
and in Biloxi whites with
clubs and chains attacked Negroes at a public beach;
ten were
even wounded by gunshots.
In May 1960 SNCC met at Atlanta University, and James Lawson wrote
the original draft for what became the following SNCC Statement
of Purpose:
We affirm the philosophical or religious ideal of nonviolence
as the foundation of our purpose,
the pre-supposition of our faith, and the manner of our action.
Nonviolence as it grows from Judaic-Christian tradition
seeks a social order of justice permeated by love.
Integration of human endeavor represents
the crucial first step toward such a society.
Through nonviolence,
courage displaces fear; love transforms hate.
Acceptance dissipates prejudice; hopes ends despair.
Peace dominates war; faith reconciles doubt.
Mutual regard cancels enmity.
Justice for all overthrows injustice.
The redemptive community supersedes
systems of gross social immorality.
Love is the central motif of nonviolence.
Love is the force by which God binds
man to Himself and man to man.
Such love goes to the extreme;
it remains loving and forgiving even in the midst of hostility.
It matches the capacity of evil to inflict suffering
with an even more enduring capacity to absorb evil,
all the while persisting in love.
By appealing to conscience
and standing on the moral nature of human existence,
nonviolence nurtures the atmosphere
in which reconciliation and justice become actual possibilities.22
SNCC elected Marion Barry chairman, and he testified before
the
platform
committee at the Democratic Party's national convention
at Los Angeles in July.
By February 1961 more than 3,600 demonstrators
had been in jail.
That month SNCC began a no-bail tactic when
Charles Sherrod, Charles Jones,
Diane Nash, and Ruby Doris Smith
were arrested at Rock Hill, South Carolina;
they were sentenced
to thirty days.
In Atlanta eighty students stayed in jail.
Also
in February SNCC began testing the Boynton decision
that declared
discrimination at facilities of interstate travel illegal.
Freedom riders left Washington on May 4, and at the Rock Hill
bus station
John Lewis and Albert Bigelow were beaten while entering
a white waiting room.
At Anniston, Alabama, a bomb was thrown
onto the bus
passengers suffered smoke inhalation but escaped
as the bus burned up.
A second bus arrived an hour later, and
eight men beat up the protesting riders
with metal pipes; James
Peck needed fifty stitches in his head.
At Birmingham drivers
refused to take them farther, and they flew to New Orleans.
Diane
Nash in Nashville organized ten students, who took a bus to Birmingham,
but Police Chief Bull Connor arrested them and
drove them 120
miles to the Tennessee border.
They tried again, and after President
Kennedy's phone calls,
a bus took them from Birmingham to Montgomery
on May 20.
Kennedy's representative in the Justice Department,
John Siegenthaler, flew to Montgomery.
There a mob of three hundred
with clubs and sticks knocked out Siegenthaler,
and no ambulance
would come to help him or the other wounded demonstrators.
Attorney
General Robert Kennedy learned what happened
and sent his deputy
Byron White with US marshals.
Governor John Patterson declared
martial law, and the freedom riders were joined
by 1200 people
at Abernathy's Baptist church,
where the marshals used tear gas
to disperse the surrounding mob.
With the National Guard on the
streets the twelve freedom riders made it to the bus
and Jackson,
Mississippi, where they were arrested for entering a white waiting
room.
They refused to pay fines and were beaten in jail.
William
Coffin led a group of white ministers, and they were arrested
in Montgomery along with Abernathy and Shuttlesworth.
The freedom rides continued, and by the end of the summer in 1961
more than three hundred had been arrested.
Treatment was the worst
in Mississippi, where prisoners,
such as Stokely Carmichael, had
their bedding removed for singing.
That summer President Kennedy's
assistant Harris Wofford,
Burke Marshall from the Civil Rights
Division, and the Taconic and Field Foundations
offered SNCC funds
to work on voter registration in the South.
Tim Jenkins took this
idea to a SNCC meeting,
but many wanted to continue the direct
action effort.
Ella Baker suggested a compromise, and they agreed
to work on both.
Bob Moses led heroic efforts in McComb, Mississippi despite violent
opposition.
Although Mississippi was 43% Negro,
only five percent
of them were registered to vote.
The federal government filed
some lawsuits but did not
reign in the abusive police power in
Mississippi.
Although the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals and Supreme
Court Justice Hugo Black
ordered the University of Mississippi
to admit James Meredith in the fall of 1962,
Governor Ross Barnett
tried to resist until September 30 when President Kennedy
federalized
the Mississippi national guard and sent 400 marshals,
who were
attacked by a mob of two thousand whites;
two people were killed,
and more than 300 were injured.
Within ten days the US Army had
12,000 troops in Oxford, Mississippi.
Meredith graduated the following
year and was
wounded on a "walk against fear" in June
1966.
On March 23, 1963 the SNCC office used for voter
registration in Greenwood was destroyed by a fire.
Four days later leaders
Moses, Jim Forman, and eight others
were arrested for marching
to the county courthouse.
They were released after the US Justice
Department
postponed its suit against local officials.
NAACP field
secretary Medgar Evers was murdered
in his driveway at Jackson
on June 12.
By the end of 1963 SNCC had 130 staff working in the
South.
Historian Howard Zinn participated in the Freedom Day demonstrations
at Hattiesburg, Mississippi on January 22, 1964, and in his book
SNCC: The New Abolitionists he wrote an account
of their
efforts to register voters led by Bob Moses.
Charles Sherrod and Cordell Reagon began the
SNCC effort in Albany,
Georgia in October 1961.
On November first they rode a Trailways
bus to Albany with Charles Jones and
Jim Forman to test compliance
with the Interstate Commerce Commission's
recent barring of segregation
in terminals.
Police ordered them to leave a white waiting room,
and the violation was reported to the US Justice Department.
A
coalition of groups called itself the Albany Movement,
and five
students were arrested on November 22.
When Albany State College
expelled them and
others were fired, students marched in protest.
An interracial group of nine activists, which included Bob Zellner,
Tom Hayden
and his wife Sandra, were arrested with two others
at the bus terminal
by Albany Police Chief Laurie Pritchett on
December 10.
During their trial hundreds of students marched in
protest,
and a total of 737 were arrested, mostly for parading
without a permit.
A boycott of the city buses put the bus company
out of business.
Those disobeying segregation in the courtroom
were dragged out.
King and Abernathy returned to Albany for their
trials in July 1962.
They refused to pay a fine; but someone else
did so secretly, and they left.
That summer hundreds of youths
were arrested for disobeying segregation
at the library, restaurants,
the park, the swimming pool, and the bowling alley.
The Albany
Movement registered five hundred Negroes
to vote and began running
candidates for office.
When Charles Wingfield was expelled for
putting up a petition on the wall of his school,
more than a thousand
students stayed out of school in protest.
Wingfield was not re-admitted
but began working for SNCC.
In April 1963 William Moore was carrying protest signs on a walk
to Mississippi,
but he was murdered on a highway in Alabama.
SNCC
and CORE organized an interracial group of ten to continue his
walk.
They left Chattanooga on the first of May and were accompanied
by a group of reporters; they were frequently harassed by local
racists.
At the Alabama border Governor George Wallace had them
arrested,
and after 31 days in jail, they were fined $200 each.
At the massive demonstration in Washington on August 28, 1963
SNCC chairman John Lewis was persuaded by other leaders to soften
his criticism
of the Kennedy administration's failure to protect
civil rights in the South.
Lawyers and historian Zinn pointed
out that the US Code in Title 18 Section 242
makes it a crime
to deprive any inhabitant of their rights, and Title 10 Section
333
authorizes the President to use armed forces to suppress domestic
violence
that opposes or obstructs the laws of the United States.
Yet thousands of Negroes and some whites had been jailed and brutally
treated
in nonviolent efforts to secure their constitutional rights.
Injunctions against officials could have been issued
to deter
violations and protect those rights.
Judges could have jailed
violators for civil contempt.
Robert Moses brought a suit against
Attorney General Robert Kennedy
which had been denied and was
being appealed.
In his speech Lewis removed the complaint that
the pending civil rights bill
would not protect people from police
brutality.
He did criticize the federal government for indicting
nine civil rights leaders
for peacefully protesting in Albany,
Georgia,
and more than thirty FBI agents were on this case.
His
remark that this was a conspiracy to appease
southern politicians
was also self-censored.
Selma, Alabama had a history of being a slave market and a lynching
town.
In Dallas County 57% of the people were of African descent,
but only one percent of eligible blacks were registered to vote
compared to 64% of eligible whites.
During voter registration
efforts in early fall 1963 more than three hundred people
were
arrested as Sheriff Jim Clark and his deputies
with clubs used
electric cattle prods against demonstrators.
At a church meeting
Dick Gregory spoke for two hours,
humorously pointing out the
absurdities of segregation.
On October 7, Freedom Day, 350 Negroes
stood in line all day
to try to register to vote; those trying
to give them water or food
were arrested while FBI officials watched
and did nothing.
In June 1964 a group of 25 blacks traveled from Mississippi to
Washington
to ask the federal government for protection during
Freedom Summer
when seven hundred mostly white college students
came to help
the mostly black SNCC and other civil rights workers
in Mississippi.
On June 21 James Chaney, Michael Schwerner, and
Andrew Goodman
were murdered in Neshoba County.
Harvard law school
professor Mark Howe blamed the Attorney General
for not using
the law to protect civil rights workers.
About two thousand students
attended more than thirty Freedom Schools that summer.
The church
in Gluckstadt used for the school was burned down.
The Mississippi
Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) led by Fannie Lou Hamer
decided
to register voters independently of the state,
and 80,000 registered
with the new party.
During the Freedom Summer more than a thousand
people were arrested in Mississippi.
The MFDP tried to get its
delegates seated at the
Democratic national convention in Atlantic
City,
but they were only allowed two delegates.
Federal indifference to police brutality continued during
demonstrations
at Selma in the first three months of 1965.
Only for the large
march from Selma to Montgomery did President Johnson
authorize
the national guard to protect marchers.
After the murders of Jimmie
Lee Jackson, Rev. James Reeb, and Viola Liuzzo
in the spring
of 1965 Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Ture)
led the SNCC effort in
Lowndes County, Alabama.
In May the SNCC executive committee had
a closed meeting about whether
SNCC workers should carry guns,
as some already were.
Carmichael started the Lowndes County Freedom
Organization (LCFO)
as a black political party with the black
panther as its symbol.
By the fall SNCC workers had moved beyond
the South and were working
Boston,
Detroit, Chicago, Washington,
San Francisco, and Philadelphia, and Los Angeles.
In January 1966
SNCC issued a strong statement opposing the Vietnam War.
That
month they started boycotting the buses in the
District of Columbia
and demanded home rule.
In May 1966 Carmichael was elected chairman
of SNCC, replacing John Lewis.
Meanwhile problems were surfacing outside the South.
In one
night of rioting in the Watts section of Los Angeles in August
1965
more people were killed than in ten years of nonviolent demonstrations
across the country.
On June 6, 1966 James Meredith was shot while
leading a march in Mississippi.
King visited him in the hospital
and took his place on the march.
Stokely Carmichael and the Black
Power advocates wanted to exclude whites,
but King said he would
withdraw.
They agreed to keep the march interracial and nonviolent.
In January 1966 King had moved his family into a Chicago slum
to begin a protest for better housing and economic conditions.
Mayor Daly closed up City Hall, but like his namesake Martin Luther,
King nailed his specific demands to the closed door.
Finally,
to avoid a violent confrontation Mayor Daley met with King,
Archbishop
Cody, Chicago Real Estate Board representatives,
the Chicago Housing
Authority, business and industrial leaders,
and black leaders
of Chicago and the SCLC.
An open housing agreement was announced
on August 26.
An SCLC poverty and unemployment program called
Operation Breadbasket
was put under the leadership of Jesse Jackson.
At the annual SCLC convention in August 1966 at Jackson, Mississippi,
King called for a "guaranteed annual income,
and a convention
resolution proposed $4,000 per year.
In a debate on a 90-minute
Meet the Press program on NBC television on August 21,
King, Whitney
Young, and Roy Wilkins argued for adhering to nonviolence
while
Stokely Carmichael, James Meredith, and Floyd McKissick advocated
black power.
King believed in black empowerment but considered
it a tactical mistake
to use the term "black power"
because it tended
to provoke the majority into crushing the minority.
In his last book, Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?,
Rev. King responded to the concerns of those advocating black
power;
but he still recommended nonviolent methods and reconciliation
with whites.
He warned that power without love is reckless and
abusive,
and he admitted that love without power is sentimental
and weak.
The aim should be justice.
He argued that the recent
riots showed the futility
of using violence in the struggle for
racial justice.
Murdering liars and haters does not end the lie
and the hate.
Only nonviolence can break the chain reaction of
evil.
He believed that both education and social action are needed.
King perceived that the root cause of both racial hatred and war
was fear.
He hoped that the greatest application of the nonviolent
methods used
in the civil rights movement would be for world peace,
asking,
"Do we have the morality and courage required to
live
together as brothers and not be afraid?"21
War, he said,
had become obsolete; but he knew the danger when he saw
the leaders
of nations preparing for war while talking peace.
He warned of
the ultimate danger to the human race.
If we assume that life is worth living
and that man has a right to survive,
then we must find an alternative to war.
In a day when vehicles hurtle through outer space
and guided ballistic missiles carve highways of death
through the stratosphere,
no nation can claim victory in war.
A so-called limited war will leave
little more than a calamitous legacy of human suffering,
political turmoil and spiritual disillusionment.
A world war will leave only smoldering ashes
as mute testimony of a human race
whose folly led inexorably to ultimate death.
If modern man continues to flirt unhesitatingly with war,
he will transform his earthly habitat into an inferno
such as even the mind of Dante could not imagine.
Therefore I suggest that
the philosophy and strategy of nonviolence
become immediately a subject for study
and for serious experimentation in every field of human conflict,
by no means excluding the relations between nations.
It is, after all, nation-states which make war,
which have produced the weapons
that threaten the survival of mankind
and which are both genocidal and suicidal in character.23
He had faith that we can end war and violence as long as
we
do not succumb to fear of the weapons we have created.
He recommended
that the United Nations consider using
nonviolent direct action
as an application of peaceable power.
He prophesied that achieving
disarmament and peace
would depend on a spiritual re-evaluation.
He warned that a nation, which spends year after year more money
on military defense
than on social programs, is moving toward
spiritual death.
Ultimately there must be a world-wide fellowship
based on unconditional love for all people.
King's conscience told him that he must speak out against the
Vietnam War,
even though the SCLC leaders asked him not to speak
as SCLC President but as a private citizen.
Many civil rights
leaders considered his denunciation
of Johnson's Vietnam policy
a mistake.
However, his wife Coretta, his former professor Harold
de Wolf, A. J. Muste,
and UN Ambassador Arthur Goldberg supported
him for his courageous stand.
In January 1967 in Los Angeles he
complained that the promises of the Great Society
had been shot
down on the battlefields of Vietnam.
He suggested combining the
fervor of the civil rights movement with the peace movement.
He
spoke at the Spring Mobilization campaign organized by A. J. Muste.
While in Geneva, King called for an immediate negotiated settlement
to the "immoral" war.
At Riverside Church in New York
on April 4, 1967 he proposed
a five-point peace program for Vietnam:
an end to all bombing, a unilateral cease-fire
to prepare for
negotiation, curtailment of military build-ups throughout Southeast
Asia,
realistic acceptance of the National Liberation Front (NLF),
and the withdrawal of all foreign troops from Vietnam
in accordance
with the 1954 Geneva agreement.
He criticized current American
values and
suggested radical changes that are still needed.
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.24
King with Benjamin Spock and Harry Belafonte led a demonstration
of more than 125,000 to the United Nations building in New York
on April 15,
and they sent a note to Ralph Bunche that they were
supporting peace,
equal rights, and the self-determination of
peoples.
In 1968 Martin Luther King continued to criticize the war in
Vietnam,
and on January 14 he went to the Santa Rita jail to visit
Joan Baez,
who had been arrested with others at a draft board
in California.
He refused to segregate his moral concern for peace
from that for justice,
believing that there can be no justice
without peace nor peace without justice.
He recommended civil
disobedience to stop the abominable and immoral Vietnam War.
He
was preparing a massive Poor People's Campaign for whites as well
as blacks
when he was called to Memphis to assist with a strike
of the sanitation workers.
Two thousand people at Clayborn Temple
wanted to hear him speak.
He declared his support for their cause,
and then he began
to reflect about the threats made against his
life.
He confessed that he would like a long life, but his main
concern was to do God's will.
He was glad that he had been to
the mountain top and seen the Promised Land.
The next day, April
4, 1968, Martin Luther King, Jr. was shot and killed.
He had already
requested a simple eulogy in a sermon
he had given two months
before when he had said,
I’d like someone to mention that day
that Martin Luther King, Jr. tried to give his life serving others.
I'd like somebody to say that day
that Martin Luther King, Jr. tried to love somebody.
I want you to say that day,
that I tried to be right on the war question.
l want you to be able to say that day
that I did try to feed the hungry.
I want you to be able to say that day
that I did try in my life to clothe those who were naked.
I want you to say, on that day,
that I did try, in my life, to visit those who were in prison.
I want you to say that I tried to love and serve humanity.
Yes, if you want to say that I was a drum major,
say that I was a drum major for justice;
say that I was a drum major for peace.25
Cesar Estrada Chavez was born near Yuma, Arizona on March 31,
1927.
His grandfather had migrated from Mexico in the 1880s, and
his father,
Librado Chavez, homesteaded land and ran a grocery
store.
During the Depression, Librado had to sell his store to
pay his back taxes;
a local banker had denied him a loan even
though he qualified under federal guidelines.
During the 1930s
about a half million Mexicans were repatriated
or deported from
the United States.
In 1939 the Chavez family along with thousands
of poor whites from the Midwest
and black sharecroppers from the
South went to California looking for work.
His father joined various
unions, and the family often quit jobs in protest of bad treatment.
Cesar completed the eighth grade before he left school to work
when his father was temporarily incapacitated by a car accident
in 1942.
The back-aching experience of using a short-handled hoe
stimulated Cesar
to work years later for the banning of that tool.
He experienced racial discrimination,
and he had been punished
at school for speaking Spanish.
In 1944 he was arrested for refusing
to sit in the Mexican section of a theater in Delano.
That year
he had joined the US Navy and was sent to the Mariana Islands
and Guam, where he worked as a painter.
Cesar married his sweetheart
Helen Fabela in 1948,
and on their honeymoon they visited all
the California missions.
He and his parents worked as sharecroppers
growing strawberries for two years.
Then Cesar with his growing
family spent a year and a half working in the forests
of northern
California before settling in the Sal Si Puedes barrio of San
Jose,
where Cesar got a job in a lumber mill in 1952.
Ernesto Galarza had earned a Ph.D. from Columbia University and
organized
for the National Farm Labor Union (NFLU);
he initiated
the supermarket picket lines to boycott table grapes.
Galarza
also worked for the AFL-CIO's Agricultural Workers Organizing
Committee (AWOC) and advised Cesar during his early years of organizing.
Under the leadership of Saul Alinsky, the Community Service Organization
(CSO)
had registered 15,000 new voters in 1949 and helped Edward
Roybal
get elected to the city council in Los Angeles.
When drunk
police officers beat seven Chicanos nearly to death in 1951,
CSO
efforts made authorities hold the officers accountable for what
navy men had gotten away with during the Zoot Suit riots of 1942.
Cesar Chavez worked as a volunteer for the CSO registering people
to vote,
and he became a friend and assistant of Catholic priest
Donald McDonnell, who also served farm workers.
Cesar studied
on his own and was especially influenced by Louis Fisher's Life
of Gandhi.
In 1952 Fred Ross hired Chavez to work full-time
as a CSO organizer for $35 a week.
During the McCarthy era the
FBI conducted various investigations of liberal groups,
but Chavez
persuaded the FBI not to allow the Republican party
to interfere
with their voter registration efforts.
From 1953 to 1955 the Immigration
and Naturalization Service (INS)
deported nearly two million Mexicans.
Chavez was an effective and hard-working organizer, and his family
moved to Oakland
and then to various places in the San Joaquin
Valley;
his salary was increased to $58 a week.
In the summer of 1958 the United Packinghouse Workers union promised
the CSO
$20,000 for a new chapter in Oxnard, and Cesar Chavez
was put in charge.
At this time a big issue was the competition
with the bracero program
of guest workers from Mexico that had
started
during World War II to provide needed labor.
During a
lemon workers strike Chavez and the CSO used persistent applications
for jobs, boycotts, and sit-down strikes in the fields;
they won
their campaign to have local workers hired first,
and their wages
went up from 65 to 90 cents an hour.
In 1959 Cesar wanted to start
a union, but he was appointed state director of CSO
and was assigned
to Los Angeles, where he worked for two years.
That year McDonnell
and another priest named Thomas McCullough
along with Dolores
Huerta persuaded the AFL-CIO to support the forming
of a farm
workers union, and they founded the
Agricultural Workers Organizing
Committee (AWOC).
Huerta persuaded the Filipino Larry Itliong
to join them.
Chavez began to work with Huerta and Gil Padilla.
At the 1962 annual CSO convention in Calexico, Cesar proposed
a union movement
for farm workers; when this was rejected, he
resigned and moved to Delano in April.
With little savings for
his family of eight children, Chavez often worked in the fields
with his wife Helen from 6 a.m. to 2 p.m. and then
organized on
his own the rest of the day and evening.
Traveling to their camps
and fields and meeting workers in their houses,
he passed out
more than 80,000 questionnaires on the issues.
Julio Hernandez
had been blackballed for being in a union in 1951,
but Cesar persuaded
him to try again.
Dolores Huerta was upset that AWOC organizers
were too cozy with contractors,
and she quit to work with Chavez,
who set up an office in his brother Richard's garage.
In the fall of 1962 about 150 delegates of workers met at a theater
and formed the National Farm Workers Association (NFWA) with a
flag
of a black eagle in a white circle on a red background and
the motto "Viva la Causa!"
Chavez was elected president
with Huerta, Hernandez, and Padilla as vice presidents.
Dues were
set at $3.50 per month, and the goal was to get
the $1.50 minimum
wage for farm workers with unemployment insurance.
Richard Chavez
was a carpenter and had built a house, and his brother Cesar
got
him to mortgage it so that they could start a burial-insurance
program and credit union.
Helen Chavez set up a co-op for auto
supplies and administered the credit union.
Cesar was offered
a $50,000 grant from a foundation
but turned it down to retain
independence.
He was the only union official at that time
whose
salary came completely from the workers.
Chavez was offered a
job as director of the Peace Corps in Latin America
with an annual
salary of $21,000; yet he rejected that offer even though
he only
was getting $50 per week and sometimes he still had to work in
the fields.
Chavez wanted to build up the organization before going on strike,
and by 1964
the NFWA had a thousand dues-paying members and more
than fifty locals.
In December they began their newspaper, El
Malcriado, which means "the unruly one."
In March
1965 flower workers, who had been promised $9 per thousand plants
but were paid less than $7, went on strike.
During the summer
Gilbert Padilla and Protestant minister Jim Drake organized
protest
marches and a rent-strike because of the
miserable shacks in the
labor camps in Tulare County.
The bracero program had been ended
in 1964, but in the summer of 1965
growers persuaded Governor
Pat Brown to pressure President Lyndon Johnson
into reviving the
program; pay had to be at least $1.40 an hour.
When growers paid
the domestic workers only $1.25, the Filipinos
of the AWOC in
the Coachella Valley went on strike and got better wages.
However,
other growers in the Delano area also paid less and
wanted to
pay Mexican-Americans only $1.10 per hour.
On September 8 Larry
Itliong led the Filipino workers on a strike.
Chavez had been
learning from the nonviolent civil rights movement led by Dr.
King.
He called a meeting and warned against using violence
even
though violence would be used against them,
and the vote for a
strike was unanimous.
Chavez and others found that when they did
not react violently,
they gained the sympathy of other workers.
Cesar said,
People don’t like to see a nonviolent movement subjected to violence,
and there’s a lot of support across the country for nonviolence.
That’s the key point we have going for us.
We can turn the world if we can do it nonviolently.26
Law enforcement tended to be on the side of the growers.
Confrontations
occurred on the picket lines, and 44 pickets,
including Helen
Chavez, were arrested and transported to Bakersfield in October.
Cesar Chavez publicized the violence used against them
and found
that such unjust acts actually helped their cause.
He coordinated
with AWOC leader Al Green.
With Filipinos and Mexicans on strike,
48 ranches were affected.
Chavez immediately sent letters to the
growers to negotiate,
but they were returned unopened.
SNCC organizers
began arriving to help, and Luis Valdez came from the
San Francisco
Mime Troupe and started El Teatro de Campesino
to perform skits
that would educate workers in the camps.
In December, Walter Reuther
of the United Auto Workers
came to support their effort, and the
UAW donated money to the strike.
Reuther, who led the sit-down
strikes at General Motors in 1937, said,
"There is no power
in the world like the power
of free men working together in a
just cause."27
The NFWA was awarded a $267,887 grant from
the
US Office of Economic Opportunity as part of its poverty program,
and Chavez asked Sargent Shriver to postpone the grant until the
strike was over.
During hearings of the Subcommittee on Migratory
Labor,
Senator Bobby Kennedy reminded Kern County sheriff Roy
Galyen,
who had arrested picketers, of the US Constitution.
Kennedy
even joined a picket line supporting the grape strike.
In March 1966 Cesar Chavez organized a 250-mile march to Sacramento
in
25 days that ended on Easter Sunday, but Gov. Brown chose to
go to Palm Springs.
The Schenley Corporation was affected by the
strike and offered Chavez a contract,
but the powerful Di Giorgios
made a deal with the Teamsters,
who rushed an election on union
representation.
Chavez advised boycotting that election, and Dolores
Huerta won the support
of the Mexican-American Political Association
(MAPA),
which convinced Gov. Brown to investigate and invalidate
the early election;
a new election was scheduled for August 30.
The NFWA merged with the AWOC to form the
United Farm Workers
Organizing Committee (UFWOC) within the AFL-CIO;
Chavez became
director and Itliong vice director.
The UFWOC got 530 votes to
331 for the Teamsters,
and only twelve workers voted not to have
a union.
Martin Luther King sent them a congratulatory telegram,
saying,
"The fight for equality must be fought on many fronts."28
In another election at Arvin the UFW won by even more votes.
Chavez
began negotiating with Di Giorgio executives, but violence against
strikers
provoked Chavez into calling for a boycott against
their
TreeSweet juices and S&W canned foods.
When Chavez went with
newly converted strikers to pick up their things
at a company
labor camp, they were arrested and convicted of trespassing;
but
this outrage won over more workers.
In September 1966 the Perelli-Minetti winery made a deal with
the Teamsters,
and UFW declared a boycott against their labels
and stores that sold their wines.
In April 1967 Di Giorgio became
the first employer that agreed to finance
a health and welfare
fund for farm workers with vacation and holiday pay.
The UFW won
another election against the Teamsters, and by July 1967
the biggest
vintner Gallo and Christian Brothers, Almaden, and Paul Masson
had all agreed to negotiate with the farm workers.
Padilla and
Drake went to Texas, where Rangers were breaking strikes.
Chavez
hired the lawyer Jerry Cohen, and he eventually won a suit against
the Texas Rangers that was decided by the US Supreme Court in
the 1970s.
Cohen also proved that the injunctions against secondary
boycotts did not apply
because farm workers were excluded by the
National Labor Relations Act.
In August 1967 workers at the Giumara
Vineyards voted to go on strike,
and two-thirds of their 5,000
workers left their jobs during the harvest.
Picketing was severely
limited to three people at each entrance,
and so Chavez announced
a nation-wide boycott of Giumara grapes.
Giumara used other names,
and Huerta and Ross urged Chavez
to broaden the boycott to all
table grapes in January 1968.
Cesar Chavez was reading the writings of Gandhi
and was adamant
about holding to nonviolence.
In October 1966 picketing Manuel
Rivera was hit by a truck and disabled.
An angry mob surrounded
the truck, but Chavez pushed through the crowd
and may have saved
the driver's life.
When Chavez found strikers with a few guns,
he confiscated them.
By February 1968 the black power movement
and the Black Panthers
had led Chicanos to form the militant Brown
Berets.
Chavez decided to go on a fast until the union members
renewed their commitment to nonviolence.
After thirteen days of
fasting he had to appear in court
and was supported by three thousand
farm workers.
After 25 days Cesar broke his fast with Bobby Kennedy,
who announced his candidacy for President a week later.
Chavez
was too weak to speak standing,
and his message was read aloud
by Jim Drake.
In their struggle of the poor against the rich he
called upon their bodies and spirits
in the cause of justice,
noting that the true act of courage
is sacrificing oneself for
others in the nonviolent struggle.
Their voter registration drive
helped Kennedy win the California primary.
However, that spring
both Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy were assassinated.
After
Nixon's election the Defense department greatly
increased its
purchase of grapes for soldiers in Vietnam.
To spread the boycott in 1969 Chavez sent Al and Elena Rojas to
Pittsburgh
Jessica Govea to Toronto and Montreal, and Eliseo
Medina to Chicago,
where he used sit-down demonstrations in the
grocery stores.
Others got the distribution of grapes curtailed
in
Detroit, New York, Boston, and Philadelphia as well.
In May
1969 Chavez and Rev. Ralph Abernathy
led a march from Indio to
the Mexican border.
In April 1970 a committee of the National
Conference of Catholic Bishops
persuaded Coachella growers to
negotiate.
Finally, 26 grape growers went to the UFW headquarters
near Delano
on July 29, 1970 and signed union contracts giving
farm workers $1.80 an hour
and contributing ten cents an hour
to the Robert Kennedy Health and Welfare Fund
and two cents per
hour for UFW service centers.
Chavez acknowledged the sacrifices
of the strikers, 95% of whom had
lost their homes and cars, but
85% of table-grape growers
in California were now under union
contracts.
Chavez recognized the power of individuals working
together for a common good
in peaceful ways that could bring about
a cultural revolution.
By August 1970 about 170 firms still had not switched from the
Teamsters
to the UFW, and Cesar Chavez called for a general strike.
On August 29 more than 20,000 people in Los Angeles marched in
protest
of the Vietnam War; police used tear gas, and three people
were killed,
including Los Angeles Times reporter Ruben
Salazar.
Violence by the Teamsters was increasing,
and the UFW's
attorney Cohen was hospitalized.
Dolores Huerta negotiated a two-year
contract with InterHarvest that raised base pay
to $2.10 an hour
and eliminated the use of DDT and other dangerous pesticides.
Chavez spent most of December in jail for not obeying an injunction
against boycotting
Bud Antle lettuce, but in April 1971 the California
Supreme Court ruled in his favor,
deciding that the strike and
boycott were legal
and that the Teamsters had colluded with the
growers.
In the Salinas Valley the Teamsters had made secret agreements
with the growers
without consulting workers, and they fired any
who refused to pay dues.
The UFW moved its headquarters south
from Delano to La Paz.
Republicans in the Arizona legislature
passed laws against boycotts and limiting strikes.
In April 1972
Chavez fasted for 24 days to raise public awareness,
and in the
fall Arizona elected its first Mexican-American governor, Raul
Castro.
Because many growers were signing contracts with the bullying
Teamsters,
in April 1973 Chavez called for a strike.
After Gallo
signed a contract with Teamsters on June 27,
Chavez announced
a boycott of Gallo wines.
Four days earlier Teamsters had attacked
picket lines with weapons, injuring 25 people.
In August two UFW
members were killed,
and Cesar asked union members to fast for
three days.
He cancelled the strike but continued the boycott.
Under President Nixon and Governor Reagan law enforcement was
hard on the strikers,
and 3,500 were arrested in 1973; but most
of the cases were dismissed by the courts.
UFW membership fell
from 40,000 to 6,500.
In 1974 Nixon resigned, and Democrat Jerry Brown was elected governor.
In February 1975 the UFW organized a march from San Francisco
to Merced,
and that year the short-handled hoe was finally banned
in California.
Brown and his agriculture secretary, Rose Bird,
pushed through
the Agricultural Labor Relations Act in June.
Yet
growers still allowed Teamsters access while barring UFW organizers,
who filed more than a thousand complaints.
Eighty elections enabled
the UFW to increase its membership.
By the end of 1975 the UFW
represented 27,000 workers to the Teamsters' 12,000,
but then
the legislature stopped funding the Agricultural Labor Relations
Board (ALRB).
The farm workers union tried to remedy this by putting
Proposition 14 on the ballot,
but the growers contributed two
million dollars to defeat it at the polls in 1976.
The next year
the Teamsters stopped contesting the farm worker elections,
and
in 1978 UFW membership passed a hundred thousand.
Chavez ended
the grape and lettuce boycotts.
Strikers had to withstand tear-gas
attacks
during the lettuce strike in the Imperial Valley in 1979.
Two marches to Salinas resulted in the Meyer Tomato company agreeing
to pay $5 an hour, union representatives' salaries, and for a
better medical plan.
The United Farm Workers experienced some dissension in the 1980s.
Chavez fired some Salinas organizers; after they went on a hunger
strike,
he filed a $25 million lawsuit against them for libel.
However, in 1982 a judge ruled that the Salinas group
had been
fired illegally and awarded them back pay.
Some on the UFW staff
objected to using the challenging interpersonal game
of Synanon
founder Charles Dederich.
In September 1983 a security guard shot
dairy worker Rene Lopez,
and the day after his death a judge granted
the
union's request to disarm the grower Sikkim's guards.
By 1984
UFW membership dropped below 12,000.
In June of that year Chavez
announced a grape boycott
to call attention to the use of dangerous
pesticides.
In 1988 Cesar fasted for 36 days to protest pesticides.
In 1991 the UFW lost a suit to an Imperial Valley grower
that
would cost them $2.4 million.
When they were threatened in Arizona
by a $5.4 million suit by Bruce Church, Inc.,
Chavez went to Arizona
near his birthplace and fasted before testifying in court.
After
breaking his fast, he felt tired and died in his sleep on April
23, 1993.
His funeral at Delano was attended by 40,000 people.
By his own standard of how well an institution helps the poor,
the work of Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers
should receive
a favorable judgment by history.
1. Brown v. Board of Education, Supreme Court of the United
States, 1954.
347 U.S. 483, 74 S.Ct. 686, 98 L.Ed. 873 in Law
and American History:
Cases and Materials by Stephen B. Presser
and Jamil S. Zainaldin, p. 738.
2. Stride Toward Freedom by Martin Luther King Jr., p.
61.
3. Ibid., p. 62.
4. Ibid., p. 63.
5. Ibid., p. 87.
6. Ibid., p. 137.
7. Ibid., p. 172.
8. Ibid., p. 216.
9. Ibid., p. 220-221.
10. Ibid., p. 222.
11. King by David L. Lewis, p. 133.
12. Ibid., p. 180-181.
13. Why We Can't Wait by Martin Luther King Jr., p. 80.
14. Ibid., p. 82.
15. Ibid., p. 83.
16. King by David L. Lewis, p. 211.
17. Ibid., p. 236.
18. Ibid., p. 242.
19. My Life with Martin Luther King, Jr.by Coretta Scott
King, p. 12-13.
20. Speech on March 25, 1965 in A Testament of Hope:
The Essential
Writings of Martin Luther King, Jr., p. 230.
21. Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community? by Martin
Luther King Jr.,
p. 182.
22. The Eyes on the Prize Civil Rights Reader, p. 119-120.
23. Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community? by Martin
Luther King Jr.,
p. 183-184.
24. A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings of Martin Luther
King, Jr.,
p. 240.
25. Ibid., 267.
26. Quoted in Cesar Chavez: A Triumph of Spirit
by Richard
Griswold del Castillo and Richard A. Garcia, p. 47.
27. Quoted in The Fight in the Fields by Susan Ferriss
and Ricardo Sandoval,
p. 114.
28. Ibid., p. 133.
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