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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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

The chapter discusses the explosive history of Southern University in the years leading up to the Black Power Movement. Baton Rouge, Louisiana was the setting for one of the largest student protests in the country as thousands of students flocked to the streets in protests against Jim Crow policies. Prior to this emergence, students were nurtured for years in a space cultivated by Joseph Samuel Clark, who served as the school’s first president and was succeeded by his son, Felton Grandison Clark. Like many black college presidents, Clark enjoyed the reputation of a fervent race man who embraced the tenets of the second curriculum. Yet as the modern civil rights movement approached, Clark succumbed to the pressures of the state and transformed into one of the most notorious HBCU presidents during the era – expelling students, firing faculty, and running the campus with a vise-like grip. Nevertheless, the Southern student body powered through these obstacles and created one of the most radical spaces for black youth in the deep south.

By 1964, supporters of nonviolent activism had largely abandoned their belief that filling jails could bring long-term, meaningful change to black communities. The movement's focus upon voter registration was a major factor behind that development. While arrest and imprisonment remained an ever-present danger for civil rights activists, it became something to endure, rather than an integral part of their protests. As well as exploring this changing approach to the incarceration of movement supporters, chapter 5 also looks at the jail experiences of the white student volunteers who came to Mississippi as part of the Freedom Summer project. Using a combination of autobiographies, oral history interviews, and jail letters, the author shows how the volunteers’ encounters with police, judges, and jailers often radicalized the volunteers, while also exposing the depth of racism within the criminal justice system.

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 Holtville, California, Ruth Steiner experienced the civil rights movement firsthand as she grew up watching her father fight fervently against the racial discrimination endured by Mexican immigrants in Southern California. This experience, along with her active involvement as a member of the Unitarian Church of Denver, her experiences in the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), and the influence of CORE chairman Jim Reynolds, convinced Steiner that she had to make a difference. On December 13, 1964, she addressed the First Unitarian Society of Denver in Colorado. This chapter reproduces Steiner’s speech, in which she narrated her participation in the Freedom Vote in Hattiesburg, Mississippi. The Freedom Vote was aimed at encouraging the blacks of Mississippi to vote in a “mock” election with candidates from the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. According to Steiner, the “big enemy of segregation” is multilayered and existentially devastating.