Although African American men were given the right of the franchise with the passage of the Fifteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution in 1870, almost a hundred years later many were still denied their constitutional right. Local and state functionaries used legal and extralegal methods to prevent this, such as poll taxes, literacy tests, and sinister methods such as beatings and lynchings. Even though SNCC activists had been striving to secure civil rights in rural Mississippi since 1961, they found that zealous and often vicious resistance by whites wanting to maintain the racial status quo in the state would not allow the direct action campaigns that proved successful in municipal areas like Montgomery and Birmingham.
In 1962 Moses became the director of the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO), an association of organizations that included CORE, the NAACP, and the SNCC. Responding to an upsurge of racial violence in 1963 that the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights described as a total collapse of law and order, he proposed that northern white student volunteers take part in a large number of simultaneous local campaigns during the summer of 1964. Moses and SNCC volunteers played the largest role in providing the majority of the funding and headquarters staff. The COFO sent letters to prospective volunteers alerting them to the possibility of arrest, the need for money to make bond and sustain themselves, and the necessity of obtaining Mississippi driver’s licenses and tags for their cars.
The Freedom Summer project attracted more than a thousand volunteers, the majority of whom were affluent white northern college students. Training sessions attempted to prepare them to register African American voters, teach literacy and civics at Freedom Schools, and promote the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party’s challenge to the all-white Democratic delegation at the Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City, New Jersey, which was to be held in August. On June 21, 1964, civil rights workers Andrew Goodman, James Chaney, and Michael Schwerner were reported missing after having left Meridian to investigate the burning of a black church near Philadelphia, Mississippi. The disappearance of Goodman and Schwerner, both white, captured the attention of the national media and the national government. While the abduction of Goodman, Chaney, and Schwerner deepened the volunteers’ fear, the Freedom Summer project moved forward with the planned program of voter registration. Even though approximately 17,000 African Americans attempted to register to vote, local registrars honored only 1,600 voter applications, an action that demonstrated the necessity for federal voting rights laws. The efforts of the Freedom Summer volunteers and refusal of local registrars to accept registrants’ applications created momentum for the Voting Rights Act of 1965. As the lines of demarcation between the objectives of King and the younger, more revolutionary splinter group of the African American freedom struggle became more pronounced, Freedom Summer marked one of the last key interracial civil rights efforts of the 1960s.
Linda T. Wynn
Greensboro, North Carolina, Sit-ins (1960)
On February 1, 1960, Ezell Blair Jr., Joseph McNeil, Franklin McCain, and David Richmond, all students at North Carolina Agriculture and Technical College (now University), entered FW. Woolworth’s, purchased goods, and proceeded to the whites-only lunch counter and requested service. Denied service, the four students remained seated until the store closed. Sit-ins had taken place in the 1940s, and in 1958 and 1959 in Oklahoma City, Wichita, Kansas, and in St. Louis, Missouri, respectively. These protests demonstrated that the Civil Rights Movement was not just a southern phenomenon, but also a national one in its earliest days. The mass mobilization of student protesters emboldened by the action of the Greensboro Four, as they were called, was a new weapon in the African American struggle for freedom. The Greensboro students’ attack against segregated public spaces in the South by direct non-violent resistance changed the spirit of the Civil Rights Movement. The simple request for a cup of coffee set off a chain of events that ultimately dismantled the remaining vestiges of de jure and de facto racial segregation.
The Greensboro Four returned to the Woolworth store on February 2, 1990, to commemorate their famous protest. Shown are (from left) Joseph McNeil, Jibreal Khazan (formerly Ezell Blair, Jr.), Franklin McCain, and David Richmond (AP Photo/Chuck Burton).
The quartet returned each morning with other student protesters and occupied lunch counter seats. Within a week, sit-ins took place in Durham, Winston-Salem, Charlotte, and Raleigh, North Carolina. On February 10, 1960, Hampton, Virginia, became the first city outside of North Carolina to experience a sit-in, and by the end of the month sit-ins had occurred in more than 30 communities in 7 states. By the end of April, sit-ins had reached every southern state and attracted a total of as many as 50,000 students. The sit-ins that began in Greensboro and spread to other cities across the South gave birth in April 1960 to the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Although the students at North Carolina A&T captured national attention, it was their counterparts in Nashville, Tennessee, who took over the leadership of the rapidly spreading student movement. Nashville students entered the movement 12 days after the Greensboro students. It did not hurt that in Nashville, The Tennessean covered the protest in detail: seventy stories within the next 14 weeks. While Greensboro began student demonstrations before Nashville, the Athens of the South began desegregating its lunch counters on May 13, 1960. Greensboro followed two months later and desegregated on July 25, 1960.
Linda T. Wynn
Hamburg, South Carolina, Race Riot (1876)
This event took place during the Reconstruction period after the Civil War, when freed blacks and radical Republicans held a number of elective offices and exerted significant political influence in South Carolina and other southern states. Ongoing tensions remained with former Confederates and other white Democrats who had been displaced from political power when the state’s large black population was able to exercise voting rights. In South Carolina—and in Hamburg in particular—blacks not only exercised their constitutional right to bear arms, but had formed “colored militia” units. A confrontation between the Hamburg unit and two white men, Thomas Butler and Henry Getzen, took place on July 4, 1876. The unit was in military formation along a public highway and refused to break ranks to allow the passage of a white man’s vehicle. An argument ensued between black militia captain “Doc” Adams and white general M. C. Butler on July 8. When Adams and the other blacks refused to surrender their guns, Butler and a mob of whites retaliated by attacking the outnumbered militia with artillery and other weapons. Seven blacks and one white man died in the riot, and according to one account four of the blacks killed had already disarmed and surrendered to Butler. Despite protests and mass meetings held by blacks in Charleston and efforts by white Republican governor Daniel H. Chamberlain to seek a fair and legal investigation, no people were prosecuted in connection with the incident.
Fletcher F. Moon
Harlem Race Riot (1935)
This violent event was attributed to factors including economic hardships during the Great Depression, police brutality in the black community, and job discrimination faced by African Americans. Ironically, the incident that triggered the riot involved a confrontation between a Latino boy and a white store owner in Harlem on March 13, 1935. Ten-year-old Lino Rivera was accused of shoplifting and arrested after a fight with the store owner. Rumors circulated through Harlem that Rivera had been beaten or killed by the police after his arrest, and people in the community retaliated by destroying the storefront where the incident took place. The riot expanded to other white-owned property in Harlem, resulting in damage totaling over $2 million. Three lives were lost and over 200 people were wounded before order was restored.
Tension between white business owners and black residents already existed at the time because blacks were not being hired to work at the same stores they kept in business as customers. In 1933 African Americans started picketing and boycotting these establishments. By early 1935, however, the merchants secured an injunction