Simone in her heyday and listened to Earl Grant at the Waluhaje bar.
The fighters in the rights wars carried the battle to the heart of racist resistance with assaults on segregation, Jim Crow voting laws and other practices. Their bravery and steely dedication were impressive as the death toll mounted through the 1950s and into the next decade, leaving the nation shocked, angry and weary – major events included Alabama Gov. George C. Wallace's chilling, defiant declaration, "Segregation now! Segregation tomorrow! Segregation forever!" followed by the ambush death of Mississippi NAACP leader Medgar Evers, fire hoses blasting protesting schoolchildren in Birmingham, the massive March on Washington, the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church that killed four black girls attending Sunday school, and finally, the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.
Those events and incidents, along
with others the following year, led to two blockbuster pieces of legislation that changed the South, and the nation, forever, the 1964 Civil Rights and 1965 Voting Rights Acts. The former eased the uncertainty of African Americans being allowed legal access to all public places of business. That was a necessity to break the mindset of white supremacy. The voting act resulted in a drastic reduction in the number of white sheriffs who intimidated blacks with impunity and who had at the least tolerated, if not participated, in the lynching of black people since slavery. The Voting Rights Act also altered the political process, affecting first the South but ultimately the nation, providing blacks the simple tool of the ballot to impact elections from local county governments, city councils and statehouses to Congress and, eventually, the White House.
But for Britt and me and other staffers, much of it was for naught. The Daily World and its editor/publisher, C.A. Scott, strongly opposed the movement and resisted our best efforts at providing complete, accurate and fair coverage. In fact, the two white dailies, the morning Atlanta Constitution and the afternoon Atlanta Journal, better staffed, richer and with
more resources, of course, did a more comprehensive job of journalism than we did at the World. Our daily battle inside the paper paled compared to those protesting Scott’s opposition. We fought, in vain, his changes in our copy, such as refusing to include the demands of students that downtown stores hire black clerks and integrate eating facilities – “Our readers may think we support those demands,” Scott repeatedly said. The students of the Atlanta movement once considered picketing the paper, but decided not to, one leader, Lonnie King, told me. It was not worth their time and effort, he explained.
The sit-ins in Greensboro, N.C. in 1960 may be better known, but what is believed to be the nation's first student sit-in demonstrations occurred at Read’s Drug Stores in Baltimore in January of 1955.
A group of Morgan State University students had been staging a weeklong demonstration at a nearby Read’s Drug Store in the Northwood Shopping Center, demanding to be served at the lunch counters.
While black Americans were allowed to shop at Read’s, they were refused sit-down service at the chain’s lunch counters.
On Jan. 20, student activists from Morgan and the Congress for Racial Equality (CORE) joined the protests by staging a “sit-in” at Read’s central location at Howard and Lexington streets. The effort received little fanfare and was not widely reported in the mainstream media, but Read’s felt the financial pain almost instantly from lost sales and on Jan. 22 announced that it would change its policy.
“We will serve all customers throughout our entire stores, including the fountains, and this becomes effective immediately,” Read’s president, Arthur Nattans Sr., said in an article in the Baltimore Afro-American.
The Baltimore sit-ins served as a model for sit-in movements during the Civil Rights Era. In Baltimore, Morgan students continued to organize sit-ins and protests to integrate businesses downtown.
Richard Valeriani of NBC said the Civil Rights Movement’s ‘perfect timing’ aided the development of network news.
Photo courtesy of Iaovc.org.
29