All the Work, Half the Credit: Grassroots Organizers in the Civil Rights Movement
The Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 60s was a turning point in American history. The previous two centuries were scarred with the injustices of slavery and a civil war through which the emancipation of slaves was won; even afterwards, former slaves faced discrimination and violence as they worked to integrate into the rest of free society. The Civil Rights Movement was a push, after generations of political disenfranchisement and brutal suppression, to finally realize true equality under the law for black Americans. Pressure for radical social change came from two directions: above, through federal officials and executive actions that forced Southern states to abide by law and end segregationist policies; and below, from grassroots collectives attending demonstrations, overcoming intimidation, and spreading awareness of the issues facing the black American community to pressure their government to change and respect the rights of black Americans. However, the pressure from above was often conditional or moderated, leaving some feeling unrepresented and isolated by their government. In the end, the Civil Rights Movement owes its success to the grassroots collective of supporters that endured political disenfranchisement, violence, and counter-revolutionary pressure from government officials and reactionary factions.
Grassroots members were often obstructed from electing their own representative leadership, and so that leadership often did not represent their interests. It fell on grassroots groups to educate and motivate their communities to register to vote and be heard. The Fifteenth Amendment hypothetically protected the rights of Black men to vote; in practice, however, local administrations made voting almost impossible and local white mobs threatened violence against those who would attempt to vote. In Mississippi, for example, Black voters had to complete extensive registration forms and answer a question about any of the state’s 285 sections of its constitution, to the satisfaction of a white voting official.[1] As a result, the political leadership of the nation and of southern states was selected largely without the consent of the Black population. In effect, there was no chance a pro-equality candidate could get office; their base of support would be prevented from voting and they would be shunned by the majority pro-segregation bloc. Consequentially, Black Americans lacked support from their state and federal leadership and were obstructed from electing new officials to bring about change through electoralism.
Instead of waiting for federal officials and legislators to push for change, grassroots organizations overcame obstructions to help motivate and educate their communities. One highly successful effort was the network of Freedom Schools established by the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO). These schools educated over 3500 Mississippians on basic literacy, black history, constitutional rights, and the voter registration process.[2] The Freedom Schools generated a wave of political interest in black communities; students of Freedom Schools would look at the segregated school system in Mississippi and critique their living circumstances, making political discussions a part of everyday life.[3] It was not long afterwards that COFO and other organizations — the NAACP, SNCC, CORE, and SCLC — mobilized newly-registered black voters across the country to overcome the obstacle of white supremacist political parties.
With the surge in grassroots organizing of black voters, COFO launched an ambitious effort to force its movement into the federal government by creating a political caucus, the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP), to “challenge the all-white state Democratic Party” that had long obstructed the black vote by denying entry into meetings and keeping their grievances off of the DNC’s agenda.[4] In many ways, the simple existence of the MFDP was a blow against a discriminatory state body and an uncooperative federal government; by utilizing grassroots organizers to educate and lead the black community, the MFDP worked within the system to subvert the federal officials and party leadership that worked to disenfranchise black Americans and to have their voices heard. The result would not see a drastic change in DNC leadership, but would play a role in pushing forward the Voting Rights Act of 1965.[5] The pattern here, which would be repeated on other issues during the Civil Rights movement, is that activists and organizers would first analyze an obstruction to justice and equality within black communities; they would then mobilize and educate a base of normal, everyday citizens to force the hand of an apathetic federal government to take action against a hostile state institution. Above all, it should be clear that all change began with the grassroots movements and forced the hand of federal officials to act.
Critically, when grassroots organizations did manage to extract concessions from the federal government, such as Brown v Board of Ed, it was up to these organizations to deal with the consequences in their local communities without much expectation of federal support. When the federal government upheld the right for Americans to vote regardless of race, the ruling neither made white supremacists tolerant of black voters nor obligated federal officials to ensure universal compliance: “Almost no Negroes vote,” historian Howard Zinn writes, “and attempts of the past year to register Negroes have been met with torch, shotgun, and a dozen varieties of official brutality, intimidation, and subterfuge.”[6] In effect, when legislation was passed to protect black rights, violent suppression only became more deadly, and federal officials were mostly apathetic to the destruction. White supremacists used drive-by shootings, bombings, kidnappings, and lynchings as tools to prevent societal change in the South. In one particularly vicious incident, three Freedom Summer activists (one black and two white volunteers) were arrested by a deputy sheriff and member of the KKK in Neshoba County, Mississippi; they were released from jail and later murdered by local Klansmen.[7]
The federal government did not intervene even as KKK membership spiked and the “Citizens Council” membership, an organization that published the names and addresses of registered black voters and drove white activists of the community, rose to over twenty-five thousand in Mississippi alone.[8] As a result, it often fell on activists and individual communities to protect themselves from night raids and to discourage attacks when registering or voting by carrying weapons when threatened with mob violence. Regarding the apparent apathy of federal officials in the face of this violence, Zinn remarked: “It took a series of explosive crises throughout the nation to force from [officials] words of moral concern…It took something close to a revolution to bring forth a moderate civil-rights bill, which will be further moderated by Congress, and by segregationist federal judges, and by a cautious Justice Department.”[9] Not only did the federal government fail to make changes unless forced, they also failed to honestly uphold and protect these changes. The federal officials in Washington would make proclamations of equality but would not raise a finger to stop the violent suppression of black Americans when they attempted to act as equals to white Southerners.
As if having to force the federal government to enshrine equal protections into law and then having officials indifferent in the face of political violence for exercising their equal rights was not reason enough, there remains one key justification for why grassroots organizers alone deserve credit for the success of the Civil Rights Movement: the federal government actively subverted and sabotaged the movement and its leadership. The federal government and Southern states often accused the Civil Rights Movement of acting as a vessel for hostile Communists to subvert American society. J. Edgar Hoover, then-Director of the FBI, created the COINTELPRO program to infiltrate and derail the movement, prioritizing this objective above all others at the bureau. Congressional hearings would later determine that “the FBI devoted less than 20 percent of its intelligence efforts to disrupt organized crime or to solve crimes related to bank robberies, murders, rapes and interstate theft” and instead focus “more than half of all FBI targets” on political organizations; of these political organizations, white supremacists like the Ku Klux Klan made up only two files.[10] Prominent figures in the grassroots movements — including Dr. Rev. Martin Luther King Jr, Dr. T.R.M. Howard, and Malcolm X — became targets of intense surveillance.
The FBI employed members of the black community to infiltrate meetings and report back with details for exploitation; worked to tarnish the reputation and character of civil rights leaders, even after their death; and most nefariously, coordinated with other police agencies to conduct raids on subjects of particular interest.[11] The disruption did not end with one singular rogue agency, however. President Lyndon B. Johnson himself ordered the FBI to bug the rooms of the MFDP at a convention in Atlantic City and organized a televised press event to force television networks to cut away from the end of their speech.[12] Given the general apathy of politicians and the outright hostility of members of the executive branch, at both the national and local levels, one can appreciate why activists lost faith in seeking support from higher levels of government and instead focused on local grassroots tactics. In truth, federal involvement in the Civil Rights Movement was often more intended to destroy than to support the movement.
The Civil Rights Movement overcame deliberate disenfranchisement, an indifferent federal government, and state-organized violence in its push for equality under the law. The supreme court may have ruled “separate-but-equal” unconstitutional, but it was the same body that had upheld such segregationist policies generations earlier. Presidential executive actions may have forced the hand of state governments in ending segregationist policies, but those same Commanders-in-Chief directed the FBI to infiltrate, surveil, and disrupt the Civil Rights movement and its leadership. Federal agents may have stood guard over the forced integration of schools, but they did not protect black Americans from white mob violence at the hands of terrorist organizations like the KKK or uniformed police officers. Congress may have passed legislation to enshrine equal rights and voting protections into law, but Congressmembers also watered down protections to compromise with Southern segregationists and often served without the consent of the black communities they claimed to represent, against the central tenant of Democracy.
The clear truth is that every victory pulled from the struggle of the Civil Rights Movement was painfully and arduously extracted from the jaws of a hostile society, at the cost of brutal violence and lives of free citizens, activists, and innocent bystanders, and it was accomplished only through the combined effort of a coalition of grassroots organizers. Frederick Douglass said over a century before the Civil Rights Movement: “Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what a people will submit to, and you have found out the exact amount of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them; and these will continue until they are resisted with either words or blows, or both.”[13] Federal officials were, for the history of the United States, content impose such injustices on black Americans until black World War Two veterans returned from fighting for freedom abroad and realized the hypocrisy of their own government’s actions, sparking the movement for justice and civil rights. For this reason, all credit for the struggle for equality rests firmly, now and forever, on the men and women who wrestled the word “equality” away from the mouths of far-off politicians and into the homes of their own communities.
Citations:
[1] Pearlman, Lauren, ed. 2014. The West Point Guide to the Civil Rights Movement. New York: Rowan Technology Solutions, 4.2.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Pearlman, Lauren, ed. 2014. The West Point Guide to the Civil Rights Movement. New York: Rowan Technology Solutions, 4.58.
[4] Ibid, 5.1.
[5] Ibid, 5.4.
[6] Ibid, 2.82.
[7] Ibid, 4.3.
[8] Cobb, Charles E. 2014. This Nonviolent Stuff’ll Get You Killed: How Guns Made the Civil Rights Movement Possible; (New York: Basic Books, 2014) 140–143.
[9] Pearlman, 2.104.
[10] Ogbar, Jeffrey O.G. “The FBI’s War on Civil Rights Leaders,” The Daily Beast, January 16, 2017.
[11] Ibid
[12] Pearlman, 5.2.
[13] Cobb, 153.