At the onset of the modern Civil Rights Movement, Montgomery, Alabama, was one of the first cities to employ economic pressure as a method of protest. Black Montgomery’s yearlong boycott caused the bus company, downtown businessmen, and the city to lose approximately $1 million. As in Montgomery, when black Nashville leaders and students began their formal sit-in movement, they too added an economic assault that devastated downtown merchants and business owners. The Reverend Kelly Miller Smith and Vivian Henderson, a professor of economics at Fisk University, organized a boycott of downtown merchants just before Easter. Empowered by their stated motto, “No Fashions for Easter,” the black community’s economic withdrawal deprived store owners of incalculable amounts of business. The paucity of dollars flowing into the cash registers of city merchants and businessmen caused the walls of racial segregation in Nashville to fall.
African Americans also used protests to secure fair wages and better working conditions, as clearly established by the sanitation workers’ strike in Memphis, Tennessee. While the primary impetus for the protest marches and demonstrations rested on the underpinning of economics, they brought into focus other societal maladies, including blatant racial discrimination that manifested itself in the African American community. Throughout the 1960s and into the twenty-first century, African Americans boycotted and protested with their wallets where the remnants of racism remained covert rather than overt. They targeted such corporations as Texaco, Denny’s, Coca-Cola, and Cracker Barrel, to name a few. Their use of boycotts and economic withdrawals made this methodology a compelling tool for constructive social change. African American activists and others would continue to use boycotts and protests to make American citizens more aware of, conscious about, and sensitive to all subjugated and oppressed groups.
Linda T. Wynn
Elaine, Arkansas, Race Riot (1919)
In the summer of 1919, black sharecroppers and tenant farmers in the area of Elaine, Arkansas, organized to receive fair wages for their labor in response to suspicions they were being cheated by white landowners. They created the Progressive Farmers and Householders Union (PFHU) and secured the services of a white attorney to negotiate on their behalf. On September 30, whites from the Missouri-Pacific Railroad fired on blacks attending a union meeting in a blatant attempt to disrupt and discourage the activities of the PFHU. The blacks returned fire, killing two whites; hundreds of other armed whites gathered to seek revenge. The white mob burned black homes and businesses. At least 200 blacks were killed during the riot, and 67 blacks were indicted for inciting violence. Hundreds of blacks who acted in self-defense were arrested by federal authorities, with many held in public school basements after jails were filled. Twelve black PFHU members were tried, convicted, and sentenced to death. In 1921 NAACP lawyers intervened, and six convictions were overturned by the Arkansas Supreme Court. The cases of the six other blacks were appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled in 1923 that due process law was violated in convicting them, leading to their release in January 1925.
Fletcher F. Moon
Freedom Rides from Washington, D.C., to New Orleans, Louisiana (1961)
Fourteen years after the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) attempted to desegregate interstate modes of public transportation, it would again test the South’s compliance with rulings of the U.S. Supreme Court. The May 1961 Freedom Rides tested the 1960 Supreme Court decision in the Boynton v. Virginia case, which extended the Morgan v. Commonwealth of Virginia (1946) directive to all interstate transportation facilities, including terminals, waiting rooms, restaurants, and other amenities. The court’s decision made it unconstitutional to racially segregate waiting rooms, restrooms, and lunch counters.
An interracial group of activists from CORE attempted to ride Greyhound and Trailways buses from Washington, D.C., to New Orleans, Louisiana, to test the Interstate Commerce Commission’s ban on racially segregated buses and facilities on interstate routes. However, before they reached New Orleans, the Freedom Riders met with violence that caused CORE to terminate the excursion. Refusing to let violence override nonviolence, the Nashville Student Movement played a pivotal role in continuing the Freedom Rides to desegregate interstate transportation and auxiliary facilities. Although not the progenitors of the Freedom Rides of the 1960s, Nashville’s student activists, under the leadership of Diane J. Nash, a member of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), became their driving force. On May 4, 1961, CORE sent two buses and an assembly of 13 Freedom Riders (seven black men, three white men, and three white women) on what was supposed to be a two-week trip, traveling through the deep South from Washington, D.C., to New Orleans to test their right to intermingle blacks and whites in the region’s bus stations. The group included John Lewis, a member of the Nashville student movement.
Freedom Riders met a sadistic horde of more than 100 angry whites who brutally beat them.
The interracial group encountered only a few problems during their first week of travel. However, when they reached Anniston, Alabama, on that fateful May 14 in 1961, the Freedom Riders met a sadistic horde of more than 100 angry whites who brutally beat them and fire bombed the bus. In Birmingham, a mob toting iron pipes and other weapons greeted the riders, who were battered, knocked unconscious, and hospitalized. Public Safety Commissioner “Bull” Connor knew that the Freedom Riders were coming and that hostile whites were awaiting their arrival. The following day, a picture of the burning Greyhound bus appeared in national and international news. While the violence garnered widespread attention, it also caused Farmer to terminate the ride.
On May 17, 1961, recruits left Nashville for Birmingham, Alabama. Three days later, they boarded a bus and traveled with a police escort to Montgomery, where the police abandoned them. Left to the mercy of a violent mob, several riders were beaten, causing the Kennedy Administration to call in federal marshals. On May 21 Martin Luther King Jr. flew to Montgomery to support the Freedom Riders. Three days later, 27 Freedom Riders left Montgomery for Jackson, Mississippi. Upon their arrival in Jackson, they were arrested for attempting to use the whites-only facilities. On May 26 the cadre of Freedom Riders were convicted and sent to Parchman Farm Penitentiary. The Nashville students’ single-mindedness to carry on the Freedom Rides had major consequences for the southern Civil Rights Movement. The Freedom Rides continued for the next four months with student activists in the forefront. On September 22, 1961, in response to the Freedom Rides and under pressure from the Kennedy Administration, the Interstate Commerce Commission established regulations eliminating racial segregation in train and bus terminals. These regulations went into effect on November 1, 1961.
Linda T. Wynn
The 1964 Freedom Summer project was designed to draw the nation’s attention to the violent oppression faced by African Americans in Mississippi.
Freedom Summer (1964)
Freedom Summer 1964 was an intensive voter registration project in the magnolia state of Mississippi. As a part of a larger effort launched by the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the goal was to increase the number of African American voters in the South. Initially started by SNCC activist Robert Moses in 1961, the 1964 Freedom Summer project was designed to draw the nation’s attention to the violent oppression faced by African Americans in Mississippi when they attempted to exercise their constitutional rights and develop a grass-roots freedom movement that could be sustained after student activists departed the state. By August 4, 1964, however, four people were killed, eighty were beaten, a thousand had been arrested,