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This chapter examines both secular and religious pacifists, the movement's reaction to prewar preparedness, the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the vital role that peace activists and conscientious objectors played in supporting civil liberties during the ensuing war, and the latter's heroic role in serving the mentally handicapped in often dangerous and appalling conditions. It also traces how peace activists, especially the Fellowship on Reconciliation, fought Jim Crow by helping to create the Congress of Racial Equality. Many in the so-called “greatest generation” nobly served the republic without taking up arms, and the chapter explores the histories of those pacifists who served as medics in some of the most brutal war zones. Just as military service provided veterans with newfound skills and abilities, so too did conscientious objectors emerge from prison and Civilian Public Service camps with valuable skills that shaped a generation of postwar activism.

The vision Esther and Jack had for the postwar years did not materialize, and they found themselves navigating increasingly intense anti-Communist trends in US politics. The Cold War inaugurated a period of fear and anxiety that intersected with the black freedom movement in the South. No longer able to sustain a movement that fused leftist economic reform and racial equality, the Southern Negro Youth Congress folded in 1949. Jack worked briefly for the Louisiana Communist Party, and the family then moved to Detroit, Michigan. There, Jack worked with the Communist Party to organize autoworkers, and Esther was an activist with the Civil Rights Congress and the Progressive Party. In 1951, the couple moved to New York City, where Jack was indicted under the Smith Act.

Chapter 4 charts the most contested phase of Black educational activism in the North as support for Black-controlled schools expanded alongside the Black Power movement, concurrent with the growth of court-ordered school desegregation across the urban North. “Community-control” activists, like those in New York City and Newark, New Jersey, saw separation as a rational response to what they viewed as the dismal failure of school integration. They called for community control over administration, curriculum, pedagogy, and hiring in majority Black schools and called for desegregation plans to be halted. Student activists demanded Black history courses, fairer discipline and dress code policies, and more respect for Black culture. Not everyone agreed with this renewed vision of autonomous Black institution-building, especially an older generation of civil rights warriors. Although briefly appealing, community control and Afrocentric curricula did not successfully equalize public education and receded in the early 1970s.

This chapter explores the national resurgence of the Congress of Racial Equality, which coincided with the student-led sit-in movement during the early half of 1960. Specifically, this chapter shows how a CORE chapter emerged in Brooklyn, New York and it tells of the local people, some who were moderates, and some who were former Communists, who emerged as the chapter’s leaders.

This chapter recalls the experiences of the members of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) in the state of Louisiana. Unlike the freedom movement in Tuscaloosa, civil rights activism in the rural areas of the Pelican State confronted the hard-core of white violent resistance. In this environment, few of those locals who joined the freedom movement viewed nonviolence as a way of life. Rather, in virtually all of the civil rights campaigns that CORE helped organize between 1963 and 1965, tactical nonviolence and voter registration worked hand in hand with armed resistance. The Deacons for Defense and Justice, a self-defense organization that formed in 1964, was the most sophisticated example of this type of southern black militancy. In addition to providing protection against the Ku Klux Klan, the Deacons also symbolized a new form of assertive manhood that challenged white myths of black powerlessness.

This chapter examines the new role that Harry Golden and the Carolina Israelite obtained as Golden continued to express his anti-discriminatory views: as a transplant intrigued by southerners, both Gentiles and Jews, and as an observer of the national scene and the changing attitudes about race issues. Due to his increased popularity, his essays started to appear in different outlets, such as the Congress Bi-Weekly, which serves as the house organ of the American Jewish Congress. The chapter also explores Golden’s involvement in the Civil Rights Movement, describing his interactions with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), and with A. Philip Randolph, founder of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and an influential African American activist. During this time, Golden also became a member of both the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and the Fellowship of Reconciliation, two groups that fought against racial discrimination.

During the 1960s, activists catalyzed Washington, D.C., into a new phase of civil rights activism, one that allowed them to give expression to the frustrations of poor black residents while fighting for political and economic control of the city. Chapter 1 shows how the Washington Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) chapter led by Julius Hobson, the Free D.C. campaign run by Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) leader Marion Barry, welfare rights activism by Etta Horn and other low-income black women, and the Black United Front marked a strategic shift in the local movement toward self-determination. After almost a decade fighting for civil rights, black activists no longer wanted to live in a city whose terms were dictated by white stakeholders, federal officials, and unelected representatives. As this chapter demonstrates, due in part to the attention that radical campaigns brought to the issue of home rule, and also in part to Lyndon Johnson’s own political calculus, the president issued a partial home rule measure. But while African Americans ascended to local political office, powerful white stakeholders, along with members of the Johnson administration and Congress, retained control over the city.

The Cold War in effect delegitimates an entire range of the political spectrum. At the same time, the country is becoming more of one piece as technological advances improve. Into this new world come five forces: rock and roll; the civil rights movement; anti-anti Communism; expansion of higher education; a generational divide fueled by the above and on the availability of reliable contraception and, somewhat later, recreational drugs. The most important movement for whites were the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). For blacks, most likely the Nation of Islam, the Black Panther Party, as well as the civil rights organizations.1964 saw the Freedom Summer – an attempt at registering blacks in the South to vote. Tragically, three (two white and a black) were murdered. National media made this unavoidable and led to the Voting and Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1965. Over time, successes were fewer and fewer and some groups (white and black) turned to serious violence. Meantime American involvement in the war in Vietnam eventually led President Johnson to refuse to stand for another term. Demonstrations at the Democratic convention in 1968 were repressed very violently – all covered on national television.

Chapter 3 moves from the student sit-in movement to the 1961 Freedom Ride campaign, which sought to desegregate bus terminal facilities. In doing so, it argues that the period from late 1960 through 1963 was the high-tide of the jail-no-bail protest philosophy. By exploring the treatment of imprisoned Freedom Riders, it highlights the diversity of the civil rights jail experience and how it was shaped by racial, class, and gender identities. It also continues to consider the often divisive nature of the debate over how to respond to the mass incarceration of civil rights activists.

This chapter takes seriously the concept of Christian brotherhood, which emerged in the early civil rights years as a family language with the potential to undermine hierarchies involving racial difference. Brotherhood (and sometimes sisterhood) became a crucial idea for reformers hoping to get deeper inside human relationships than legal solutions to problems of discrimination seemed to promise. The chapter presents short intellectual studies of individual reformers who used the concept of brotherhood.

This chapter details the inward-facing purposes of civil disobedience by revisiting the student-led campaign of “jail, no bail” pioneered by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). It argues that accepting arrest was a practice of “comparative freedom,” through which activists reframed the experience of incarceration as one of liberation. The point of “jail, no bail”—withholding bail money and voluntarily staying in jail—was not to signal fidelity to law, stabilize state authority, or contain the unruly potential of dissent. Rather, through “jail, no bail” student activists transformed an experience defined by fear, stigma, and vulnerability into an enactment of courage, dignity, and freedom. Accepting arrest was thus a means of withholding collective and individual cooperation from illegitimate power, and thereby refusing the rituals of submission and domination that defined Jim Crow.

Born in March 1943 in Mt. Vernon, New York, Rita Levant Schwerner was a civil rights activist who began her college education at the University of Michigan and graduated from Queens College in January 1964. She and husband Michael Schwerner, a fellow activist, began their work together in New York City, where they received brief sentences for picketing a Manhattan building in which blacks were not allowed. The couple also worked for the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) as Mississippi field officers in January 1964. That same year, Schwerner, along with CORE volunteers Andrew Goodman and James E. Chaney, were murdered by members of the Ku Klux Klan. On July 29, 1964, Rita Schwerner made a deposition in Hinds County, Mississippi. This chapter presents Schwerner’s deposition, in which she recounted the events leading up to the disappearance of her husband and his two companions. She also described the systematic psychological torture and social ostracism experienced by civil rights workers in 1964. A year later, Rita Schwerner would testify against “Preacher” Killen, one of her husband’s killers.

During the 1960s, Austin lent his talents and his newspaper in support of the direct action movement in Durham and throughout the state. Unlike many other black leaders in the city, he immediately and enthusiastically embraced an early sit-in in Durham that began in 1957, three years before the more celebrated Greensboro lunch counter sit-ins. He also aided a boycott of white retail businesses that refused to hire black workers by publishing the names of those businesses in the Carolina Times. This strategy was quite effective in forcing white businesses to hire African Americans. Austin’s efforts and those of countless civil rights activists led to major freedom struggle successes with the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Chapter 4 describes the deepening divisions in the civil rights movement in 1966 and the concomitant rise of Black Power. On January 3, the murder of Sammy Younge Jr., a navy veteran and SNCC activist, motivated SNCC to come out against the war. SNCC's antiwar stance created a national uproar, as its members were accused of treason and the moderate wing of the civil rights movement distanced itself from the group. Later in the year, SNCC would embrace racial separatism. The ramifications of opposing the war are highlighted by the controversy surrounding Julian Bond. Though elected to the Georgia legislature, Bond was denied his seat when he failed to repudiate SNCC's antiwar statement. Meanwhile, Black Power became a public sensation in the summer of 1966 and further destabilized the civil rights coalition. Increasingly consumed by the war, Johnson's commitment to the Great Society and civil rights legislation dimmed. The Democrats’ defeat in the midterm elections in November seemed to validate concerns about a white backlash. As African American casualties mounted in Vietnam, the civil rights movement seemed to be at a crossroads.

This chapter details numerous cases of housing discrimination that Brooklyn CORE investigated and fought against with interracial teams of activists. While the chapter won many of these individual cases it faced great difficulty when it tried to convince one of the city’s largest housing conglomerations, the Lefrak Housing corporation, to racially integrate its thousands of rental properties throughout the city. Brooklyn CORE had wide success on a case-by-case basis, but, despite state laws against discrimination, it could not reverse corporate practices that played the biggest role in racially segregating housing in the borough.

This chapter considers the limitations of civil rights disobedience in transforming white citizens. Building on the work of James Baldwin, Charles Mills, and Elizabeth Spelman and chronicling a “failed” protest at the 1964 World’s Fair, this chapter attends to the discursive techniques of disavowal that white citizens and state officials used to dismiss black activism as inappropriate, irresponsible, gratuitous, and violent—thereby avoiding the claims such protest made upon them, while preserving their own innocence and moral standing. In stepping outside the South and the familiar set of events that make up the public memory of the “short” civil rights movement, this chapter also suggests that some aspects of campaigns like the one in Birmingham were enabled—and publicly legitimated—by the very techniques of disavowal that limited the movement’s radical potentialities.

This chapter analyzes the protests against employment discrimination that galvanized Newark’s civil rights movement and clarified the limits of liberal reforms against which subsequent activists would organize. In 1963, hearings led by the U.S. Civil Rights Commission exposed persistent job discrimination. The city’s black freedom movement seized upon already established, but now publicly affirmed examples, to contrast officials’ promises with the reality of racial discrimination. A newly formed civil rights group, the Newark Coordinating Committee, picketed the construction of a new school to highlight the lack of black workers in the building trades. These protests upended the hierarchy of Newark’s civil rights organizations. They also sparked internal debate about strategies among black activists and their allies that enlarged the movement’s scope, while the impasses they reached prompted greater movement involvement in private sector hiring. In the short-term, their efforts yielded few victories. But the gaps between antidiscrimination law and its enforcement compelled activists to look beyond confrontation at the job site to the other actors protecting the status quo. In the long run, early protests established a foundation for some of the most hard-won affirmative action plans of the 1970s.

For most of Terrell’s life, Christianity provided her with a social structure, a network, a community, and a set of ideals by which she aspired to live. A member of the Congregational Church, her liberal theology and embrace of the “Church Militant” focused on freedom in this world as well as the next. Theologically and socially liberal, Terrell’s ecumenical goal was unity and cooperation among all denominations. Terrell hoped for a racially integrated and activist militant church. Terrell’s encounter with the Oxford Group movement introduced her to a predominantly white nondenominational evangelical religious movement. Founded after World War I by Frank Buchman, the Oxford Group was at the peak of its popularity in 1936, when almost 10,000 people, including Terrell, attended its First National Assembly, in Massachusetts. But the Oxford Group could not become ballast for her because its members did not treat her or other African Americans as equals. In the late 1940s, Terrell finally felt optimistic when Christian ministers began to engage in the Civil Rights Movement. The interracial Fellowship of Reconciliation and the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) began bringing blacks and whites together to practice a Christianity based on love, freedom, and racial justice.