Fletcher F. Moon
Lexington, Kentucky, Sit-ins (1950s–1960s)
The sit-ins of the 1950s and 1960s reached many cities and towns, including Lexington, Kentucky. It was the local and national press that carried the story of the sit-ins to the public and helped to preserve such activities in the annals of African American history. The press of Lexington, Kentucky, however, occasionally carried short stories about civil rights activities in town without providing important photographs to give a visual documentation of that history. Some scholars argue that The Herald (the morning paper) and The Leader (the afternoon paper) did irreparable damage to the Civil Rights Movement at the time and damaged the historical record. As a result, readers missed one of the most important stories on civil rights of the twentieth century.
The weekly and peaceful sit-ins that black and white protesters held in Lexington, beginning in 1959 and extending into the early 1960s, targeted racially segregated lunch counters, hotels, and theaters. Top executives of The Herald and The Leader, papers that would later merge in the 1980s, gave strict orders to their reporters to bury coverage of the protests and were not encouraged to cover the protests at all. They were told to “play down the movement” and perhaps it would simply fade away. This was a stance that many southern newspapers took, thus censoring history. Some would question the racial attitudes of the late Fred Wachs, the publisher who set the policy on excluding the protests.
They were told to “play down the movement” and perhaps it would simply fade away.
Among the leaders in the protests was retired teacher Audrey Ross Grevious. Grevious reported in an article by James Dao that she attended an NAACP convention in New York City around 1960, and on her return train trip home became agitated because she and other blacks were required to move to a rear car once the train crossed the Mason-Dixon Line. Although she grew up in the segregated South, the reality of segregation finally hit home. She decided to organize demonstrations when she reached home. Grevious, over a period of several years, organized weekend sit-ins at lunch counters, movie theaters, and hotels. In retaliation, whites who opposed integration dumped garbage and other waste on her lawn. Later, a patron in a local restaurant threw a beverage on one of her suits; she kept the suit as a “soiled souvenir.” Negative reactions to her efforts continued; for several hours, the manager of one lunch counter swung a chain barrier into her legs and left her with chronic pain that lasted for years. Following the behavior of demonstrators elsewhere, Grevious refused to move.
The demonstrators were persistent with their efforts because they wanted to draw attention to the depths of segregation in Lexington. Unfortunately, the press published stories primarily to document the arrest of demonstrators, not the depths of their endurance. Among the published photographs available about the protests are those showing over 200 demonstrators marching in a solemn single file down Main Street to agitate against segregated stores and restaurants. Others show protesters on the steps of Fayette County courthouse; their heads are bowed in prayer, and a lone young lady is seated at a lunch counter that refuses to serve her. The Lexington sit-ins are important as much for the efforts of protesters as for the censorship that the local white press placed on African American history.
Jessie Carney Smith
Longview, Texas, Race Riot (1919)
This event was the second of 25 major U.S. racial conflicts during the “Red Summer” of 1919. The small northeast Texas community experienced racial tension earlier because black leaders Samuel L. Jones, a teacher, and Dr. Calvin P. Davis had urged black cotton farmers to bypass local white cotton dealers in selling their crops. Cotton did not cause the riot; rather, it was an article in the July 5 issue of the Chicago Defender, a weekly national black newspaper, defending the reputation of Lemuel Walters, a young black resident of Longview. Walters was arrested for reportedly having a white woman from Kilgore, Texas, fall in love with him. Walters was killed on June 17, when he was handed over to a white mob. Jones, who was the local agent for the Defender, was held responsible for writing the July 5 article in defense of Walters, and he was attacked and beaten by three white men on the 10th, after the newspaper arrived in Longview. Whites were also angry because they had learned that Davis had formed the Negro Business Men’s League, which aimed to stop whites from exploiting black cotton farmers. On July 11, a group of angry white men came to Jones’s home, but they were fired upon and forced to retreat. One did not get away. He was beaten by a group of blacks who had come to defend Jones. The other whites gathered additional people, broke into a store to get guns and ammunition, returned to the black neighborhood, and set fire to the homes of Jones, Davis, and others. Local and state officials called in the Texas Rangers and the Texas National Guard, but Dr. Davis’s father-in-law, Marion Bush, was killed on July 12. The area was placed under martial law between July 13 and 18. Whites and blacks were arrested, but no one was tried for their participation in the riot.
Fletcher F. Moon
March on Washington (1963)
Attended by an estimated quarter of a million people, this march was a peaceful demonstration to advance civil rights and economic equality. The August 28, 1963, March on Washington was one of the largest demonstrations ever witnessed in Washington, D.C., and it was the first to have extensive coverage by the electronic media. Successful in pressuring the administration of President John F. Kennedy to initiate a strong civil rights bill in the Congress, the marchers gathered at the Lincoln Memorial, 100 years after the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation. Not only did the March on Washington influence the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, it also galvanized public opinion. It was during this peaceful demonstration that Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his iconic famous “I Have a Dream” speech.
Far more complicated than the romanticized imagery remembered by most, the integrationist, non-violent, liberal brand of protest that the march represented was followed by a more revolutionary, combative, and race-conscious line of attack. However, because of the march’s power of mass appeal, the 1963 March on Washington became the prototype for other social reforms, including the antiwar, feminist, and environmental movements. The 1963 March on Washington was not precedent-setting, though. Several marches or proposed marches occurred earlier. They included the proposed 1941 march called by Asa Philip Randolph, founder of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, the May 1957 Prayer Pilgrimage for Freedom and the 1958 Youth March for Integrated Schools. The objectives of these marches still had not been implemented by 1963. African Americans continued to face high unemployment, systemic denial of the right to vote, and the omnipresent racial segregation code of the South. The government’s failure to act on those goals prompted civil rights leaders to call for a march on Washington for economic, political, and social justice.
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