In early 1965, the quest to gain the right of the ballot for blacks intensified on February 18, when during a peaceful march in Marion, Alabama, state troopers attacked peaceful demonstrators and shot Jimmie Lee Jackson, who was protecting his mother from the billy club blows of the troopers. Jackson’s death eight days later galvanized the protesters’ resolve to bring national awareness to the need for a federal voter registration law. On March 7, 1965, approximately 600 marchers, led by John Lewis of the SNCC and Hosea Williams of the SCLC, walked from Browns Chapel to the Edmund Pettus Bridge, demonstrating for voter rights and remembering Jackson’s ultimate sacrifice. Once they reached the bridge, the violence of “Bloody Sunday” erupted in full view of photographers and journalists, as armed state troopers and deputies led by Major John Cloud and Sheriff Jim Clark brutally battered the protesters. The televised events of Bloody Sunday triggered national outrage and the White House was inundated with calls and telegrams. Later, Martin Luther King Jr. and other civil rights leaders decided to hold other marches. The second attempt was held on March 9, when King led the marchers despite Federal Court Judge Frank M. Johnson’s restraining order against the journey to Montgomery. Just like the March 7 protest, state troopers again met the assembly of demonstrators head on. Rather than confront the awaiting state troops, King led the assemblage of protesters in prayer and led them back to Selma. However, the day did not pass without violence, as a group of white vigilantes beat the Reverend James Reeb, a white Unitarian minister, who died two days later.
Demonstrators in Harlem, New York, show their support of the Selma to Montgomery March in 1965 (Library of Congress).
Under the protection of the court and a federalized National Guard, a third march from Selma to Montgomery was held on March 21. Four days later, approximately 25,000 protesters arrived at the state capitol in Montgomery, and King delivered a victory speech. Again, however, death invaded the ranks of the civil rights workers when the Ku Klux Klan killed Viola Liuzzo, a white woman from Detroit, Michigan, in Lowndes County, Alabama. Nevertheless, the efforts of the civil rights organizations achieved their desired goal. On August 6, 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act of 1965 into law. This act not only protects the rights of voter registration workers, it also proscribes discriminatory election measures that include land ownership as a prerequisite for voting, poll taxes, and literacy tests constructed to disenfranchise American black voters. Just as the mass demonstrations in Montgomery led to the Civil Rights Acts of 1957 and 1960, and Birmingham served as the impetus for the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the mass protest march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, led to the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. In 1996 the U.S. Congress, under the National Trail Systems Act of 1968, created the Selma-to-Montgomery Trail.
Linda T. Wynn
Springfield, Illinois, Riot (1908)
This outbreak of racial violence took place in August 1908, just as the city was preparing to celebrate the centennial of Abraham Lincoln’s birth. The state capital was known for vice, political corruption, and negative racial attitudes toward its growing number of African Americans. In July a black man, Joe James, cut a white man, Clergy A. Ballard, who caught James in his daughter’s bedroom. Ballard died from his wound, and James was beaten severely by a mob before going to jail. Things settled down until August 14, when local papers headlined his case and another crime with racial overtones. A black man, George Richardson, who was also arrested and jailed, had reportedly raped another white woman. Richardson, a working man with no previous record, was portrayed as being an ex-convict like James and a murderer. Irate whites gathered at the jail, and the crowd swelled to over 4,000 by late afternoon.
Local authorities diverted the crowd with fire engines and took the two black men away through the rear entrance. Word spread that white restaurant owner Harry Loper drove the men out of town, and the mob destroyed his business. Black neighborhoods were the next target, with two blacks lynched, others shot at or beaten, and black homes and businesses burned and destroyed. Four whites died from stray bullets before order was restored on Saturday, August 15, and the riot prompted a mass exodus of blacks from the city.
Fletcher F. Moon
Tallahassee Movement
Tallahassee’s modern movement for civil rights began in May 1956, when Carrie Patterson and Wilhemina Jakes, students from Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University (FAMU), were arrested for sitting in the white section of a Tallahassee public transit bus. Their arrest and the subsequent cross burning at their rooming house sparked a citywide boycott of Tallahassee’s public transit system. Because of the arrest and cross burning, at a mass meeting FAMU’s students voted to boycott city buses. Patterson and Jakes’s actions galvanized the black community and launched a desegregation campaign similar to the Montgomery Bus Boycott, which began in December 1955. Under the leadership of the Reverend Charles K. Steele, the Inter-Civic Council (ICC) coordinated the logistics of the mass demonstration. As the bus boycott continued, numerous people were arrested for giving car rides to the boycotters, which filled the jails to overcapacity.
On November 13, 1956, the U.S. Supreme Court affirmed the lower court ruling in the Browder v. Gayle case. Litigated by civil rights attorney Fred Gray, it held that bus segregation was unconstitutional. Later, the ICC suspended the boycott, and the transit system stopped enforcing racially segregated seating. However, refusing to acquiesce to the nation’s highest tribunal, nine white bus drivers and the company manager were arrested for allowing blacks to sit in the front of the bus in violation of the local segregation rules. Florida’s Governor Leroy Collins suspended all bus service in Tallahassee. In January 1957, a federal judge ruled that all of the state’s bus segregation laws were unconstitutional, so Collins allowed bus service to resume on a desegregated basis.
Federal troops set up mess tents at the site of the 1908 Springfield, Illinois riots (Library of Congress).
The Tallahassee Bus Boycott only foreshadowed the winds of change that were empowering the black community. Similar to other southern cities, Tallahassee was slow in surrendering its links to the Old South mentality and its resistance to a new racial order. After all, it was built on the presumption of white superiority and black inferiority. During the 1950s and 1960s, the Florida panhandle was as much a part of the Deep South as Alabama, and as noncompliant with the change in race relations.
In the summer of 1959, Miami’s chapter of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) conducted a workshop on direct nonviolence that was attended by FAMU students Priscilla and Patricia Stephens. Later, they organized a CORE chapter in Tallahassee on FAMU’s campus and became key organizers of the student sit-in movement in Tallahassee. Tallahassee’s chapter planned two sit-in demonstrations against segregated variety stores’ lunch counters in February 1960. The first sit-in occurred on Saturday, February 13, in the downtown area at Woolworth’s when Stephens and ten other students attempted to order food. Similar to what happened with the group of students in the Nashville Student Movement, their first attempt yielded neither service nor major incident. However, the second sit-in of February 20 led to eleven arrests and eight sentences of 60 days in jail or $300 in fines when students refused to move. Five students, including Priscilla and Patricia Stephens, chose to remain in the Leon County Jail for the full sentence. Like Martin Luther King Jr., who penned the “Letter from the Birmingham Jail” three years later, during her 49 days of incarceration from March 18 to May 5, 1960, Patricia Stephens penned a “Letter from the Leon County Jail.” Stephens’s letter demonstrated that students across the sit-in movement were willing to accept incarceration as a tactic against segregation. Tallahassee’s directaction campaigns continued as Stephens led students in other forms of direct non-violent protests, including the freedom rides, voter registration, the desegregation