Impacting Change – Students in the Civil Rights Movement

By Richard J. McIntire

From its very start, young people and students have played an integral part in the American civil rights and social justice movement. Arguably, the horrific kidnapping and murder of 14-year old Emmett Till at the hands of an angry white mob in Money, Miss. in 1955, was one of the catalysts that motivated thousands to fight for change.

The names of those who contributed to that massive social change in our nation’s history are countless. The icons of the movement are well known. Yet there are many others, students at the time, whose names and stories may not be as familiar but whose courage looms just as large.
Although the 1954 U.S. Supreme Court decision Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas outlawed segregation in schools, many racist school systems defied the law by intimidating Black students.

After attending Selma University and graduating from Miles College in Birmingham, Ala. in 1956, Autherine Lucy applied for admission to graduate school at the University of Alabama – a segregated, all-white institution. Though the Brown decision outlawed school segregation in theory, she knew she’d face implacable opposition. She approached the NAACP for assistance. Thurgood Marshall, Constance Baker Motley and Arthur Shores volunteered to be her attorneys. By June 1955, the NAACP lawyers won a court order prohibiting the university from denying her — or anyone else — admission based on race. In February 1956, Lucy enrolled in the graduate School of Library Science at the main campus in Tuscaloosa.

A mob of students, townsmen and Ku Klux Klansmen from across the South attempted to keep her from attending class. A police escort was required to protect her from their violence. The university administration suspended Lucy, but not the White students who attacked her. When the NAACP filed a lawsuit charging the university with contempt of court and acting in support of the mob, Lucy was expelled. The federal government failed to enforce either the Brown decision or the court order against the university.

In 1988 – 32 years later – the university finally admitted it was wrong and overturned her expulsion. Lucy and her daughter Grazia both enrolled and in 1992 were awarded degrees.

Under the guidance of then Arkansas NAACP President  Daisy Bates, Minnijean Brown, Elizabeth Eckford, Ernest Green, Thelma Mothershed, Melba Pattillo, Gloria Ray, Terrance Roberts, Jefferson Thomas, and Carlotta Walls would become known as the Little Rock Nine. They were the first Black teenagers to attend all-White Central High School in Little Rock, Ark., in September 1957.

Things grew ugly and frightening right away. On the first day of school, the governor ordered the state’s National Guard to block the Black students from entering the school. After the local police chief conceded he could not protect the nine, President Dwight D. Eisenhower sent 1,000 soldiers of the 101st Airborne to carry out the orders of the federal courts and protect the children from the racist violence.

Inside Central High, day after day, the Little Rock Nine endured unspeakable hardship and abuse from the white students —beatings, shoving, jeers, insults, and constant humiliation. Their lockers are destroyed and fireballs thrown at them in the restrooms. A lighted stick of dynamite was hurled at Melba Pattillo, she was stabbed and acid was sprayed in her eyes. Only the quick action of a soldier from the 101st saved her from being permanently blinded.

Parents of the Little Rock Nine were pressured to withdraw their children from the school. They are threatened with death. Four lose their jobs. But they stand behind their children and none back down.

During the following years, throughout the South thousands of other Black children endured similar humiliation, vicious abuse, and cruel injustice when they integrated all-white schools. These school integrators are the unsung heroes and heroines of the Freedom Movement. It was not until 1972 that all Little Rock public schools were finally integrated.

Sitting Down to Take a Stand
 
On Feb. 1, 1960, North Carolina Agricultural and Technical College students Joseph McNeil, Franklin McCain, David Richmond, and Ezell Blair, Jr., began a sit-in at a segregated Woolworth’s lunch counter. Although they were refused service, they were allowed to stay at the counter. The event triggered many similar non-violent protests throughout the South.

Ella Baker, executive secretary of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), formed by Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Rev. Ralph Abernathy, Joseph Lowery and others in 1957, contacted students on many college campuses. Within weeks students in 11 cities held sit-ins, primarily at Woolworth’s and S.H. Kress stores. When northern students heard of the movement, they decided to help their southern counterparts by picketing local branches of chain stores that were segregated in the South.

Six months later the original four protesters were served lunch at the same Woolworth’s counter. Student sit-ins were effective throughout the deep South in integrating parks, swimming pools, theaters, libraries, and other public facilities. The students showed that nonviolent direct action and youth could be very useful weapons in the war against segregation.

By April of that year, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC)   was founded at Shaw University in Raleigh, N.C. at a conference sponsored by SCLC, providing young blacks with a place in the civil rights movement.

“That was a very heady period, full of excitement and full of possibilities,” said Julian Bond, who attended that founding meeting as a leader of Atlanta’s sit-ins. He is the current Chairman of the NAACP National Board of Directors. “We literally witnessed the movement spreading each day,” he said. “We always thought we can do this [bring about change]. We knew we were ‘bad stuff’ in a good way.”

By the late 1960s, SNCC expanded its efforts into political action, launching voter registration initiatives, developing candidates and forming two political parties – the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party and the Lowndes County Freedom Organization in Alabama, a precursor to the Black Panther Party. Under the leadership of Stokely Carmichael. SNCC received a more radical image by embracing the concept of “black power.”

By August 1961, sit-ins had attracted more than 70,000 participants and generated more than 3,000 arrests. They continued in some areas of the South until and even after the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 declared segregation at lunch counters unlawful.

During the spring and summer of 1961, student volunteers began taking bus trips through the South to test out new laws that prohibit segregation in interstate travel facilities, including bus and railway stations. Several of the groups of “freedom riders,” as they are called, were attacked by angry mobs along the way. The program, sponsored by The Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and SNCC, involved more than 1,000 volunteers, Black and white.

On Oct. 1, 1962, James Meredith became the first Black student to enroll at the University of Mississippi. Violence and riots surrounding the incident caused President John F. Kennedy to send 5,000 federal troops.

Martyrs in the Cause
 
The 16th Street Baptist Church was bombed in September 1963 by members of the Ku Klux Klan in Birmingham, Ala. using 16 sticks of dynamite. The racially motivated terrorist incident against the Black church resulted in 22 injuries and the deaths of four girls – Addie Mae Collins, 15, Carole Robertson, Cynthia Wesley, both 14, and Denise McNair, 11, who was a playmate of Condoleezza Rice the current U.S. Secretary of State. The attack marked a turning-point in the U.S. civil rights movement and contributed to support for passage of civil rights legislation in 1964.

On Aug. 4, 1964 the bodies of civil rights workers James E. Chaney, 21, Andrew Goodman, 21, and Michael Schwerner, 24, were found in an earthen dam in Neshoba County, Miss., six weeks into a federal investigation supported by President Lyndon Johnson. The young men – two white, one Black – had been working to register Black voters in Mississippi, and, on June 21, had gone to investigate the burning of a Black church. They were arrested by the police on speeding charges, incarcerated for several hours, and then released after dark into the hands of the Ku Klux Klan, who murdered them.

On June 5, 1966 Meredith began a solitary “March Against Fear” from Memphis to Jackson, Miss. to protest racial discrimination. Soon after crossing into Mississippi, he was shot by a sniper. Civil rights leaders including Dr. King and SNCC’s Carmichael vowed to continue the march, which eventually reached Jackson.
 
On Feb 8, 1968, three students at South Carolina State College near Orangeburg were killed by police in what became known as the Orangeburg Massacre. In the days leading up to the shootings, about 200 protesters had gathered on the campus to protest segregation of the local bowling alley. Students continued their days of protesting by starting a bonfire. As police attempted to put out the fire, an officer was injured by a thrown piece of banister. The police believed they were receiving small weapons fire and responded by firing into the crowd. Killed in the skirmish were Samuel Hammond, Delano Middleton and Henry Smith. Twenty-seven others were wounded. Smith and Hammond attended the college. Middleton, a local high school student, was 17.
 
Protesters insist that they did not fire at police officers, but did hurl various objects (and insults) at the police. Evidence that police were being fired on was inconclusive and there is no evidence that protesters were armed or had fired on officers.
 
Although laws are in place and outright violence against people of color is not as prevalent as in the past, young people still continue to organize in their schools and communities to fight against injustices.  

“Over the past year I’ve definitely seen growing, active participation from young people speaking out on issues impacting us,” said Stefanie L. Brown, director of the NAACP Youth and College Division that counts in excess of 30,000 among its ranks. “A lot of young people are fed up with police brutality and harassment, educational inequality, juvenile incarceration and lip service from authority figures. We don’t want to be held back. We want to raise up, have a seat at the table and develop solutions then hold those in power accountable.”

“The tactics of those who laid down their lives for the struggle provide us an action guide for use today,” she said. “Our generation is not as apathetic as people make us seem.”

Richard J. McIntire, a former award-winning journalist, photographer, radio personality and public relations professional, currently serves as the Director of Communications for the NAACP National Office and can be reached at rmcintire@naacpnet.org.